Politicos, pundits and armchair campaign managers around the country are keeping a close eye on this year’s gubernatorial contest in the Commonwealth of Virginia. The stakes couldn’t be higher. In fact, many analysts believe this race (among others) may forecast things to come in the 2010 and 2012 elections – up to and including the battle for the White House.

That’s why it’s of little surprise that a branch of the Democratic Party’s propaganda machine – the unabashedly liberal Washington Post – would, per usual, abandon any semblance of journalistic integrity and rush to the aid of State Senator Creigh Deeds, Virginia’s floundering Democratic gubernatorial candidate.

Deeds, who has run an abysmal campaign thus far, continues to trail his Republican counterpart – former State AG Bob McDonnell – by double digits. In a thinly veiled effort to derail the McDonnell campaign, the Post, over the weekend, put on a case of the vapors, issuing a breathless report that presumed to expose the scandalous revelation that McDonnell, who attended the Conservative Christian Regent University School of Law, is, now brace yourself, a conservative Christian.

The Post attempted – and continues an effort – to make hay out of a decades-old graduate thesis McDonnell penned wherein he expressed traditional conservative positions on issues ranging from abortion to the “God-ordained covenantal form” of family (That would be Mom, Dad and the little squirts for all you liberal postmodernists).

“The family is an institution that existed antecedent to civil government,” he wrote, “and hence is not subject to being defined by it.”

McDonnell went on to decry the devastating toll radical feminism has taken on our culture, and lamented the undeniable reality that far too many women, who may desire to stay home and raise children, are forced to work as a result of governmental policies that favor practitioners of “alternative lifestyles,” such as “co-habitators, homosexuals or fornicators.”

He also addressed the popular notion that leaders should “correct the conventional folklore about the separation of church and state,” pointing out that our Founding Fathers gave us the First Amendment to protect freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.

The nerve!

Well, the Post’s contrived revelation sent feigned shockwaves through a crocodile-tear-blinded leftosphere, leaving the few remaining people privy to the “scandal” asking: “Yeah, so what?”

The Deeds camp – in sad desperation – has clutched onto the story like Molly Brown to driftwood, endeavoring to reinforce the facade that there is some “there” there. And the troubled candidate hasn’t shut-up about it since. Let’s hope he doesn’t.

As “Obama fever” briskly turns to “Obama fatigue,” Deeds – each time he invokes “the thesis” to assail McDonnell’s traditional Reaganesque conservatism – haplessly reminds voters of his own ideological ties to our radical Socialist-in-Chief.

Think about it. In his 1989 work, for example, McDonnell defended both the natural family and natural marriage. In 2006, the majority of Virginians – around 60 percent – passed Virginia’s marriage protection amendment, declaring, with a unified voice, that they happen to agree.

Furthermore, in his thesis McDonnell quite adeptly articulated a strong pro-life position on the issue of abortion. Again, according to a recent Gallup poll, it just so happens that, for the first time since Roe v. Wade, a majority of Americans come down with him on the issue. In fact, 76 percent of Americans now believe that abortion should either be illegal under all circumstances, or legal; but only under certain circumstances. Continued...