If George Allen gets reelected there is something really wrong with Virginia. Back in the spring, The New Republic broke the story that Allen had worn a confederate flag pin on his lapel for his high school yearbook picture. For a guy from Southern California, that’s weird. Really weird. We also know that he posed for a picture with a bunch of white supremicists back in 1996. That’s not cool. Then he called an Indian-American “macaca” which is a north-African slur meaning “monkey”. Then we learned that his mother was from north Africa. Then Allen got all huffy and pissed off when someone asked him if his French-Tunisian mother was Jewish and whether she taught him to call darkies “macaca”.
A few weeks later Mr. Allen, who is Presbyterian, grew angry at a reporter’s question about whether his mother had been born Jewish. Mr. Allen later said that after the question came up, his mother told him for the first time that her family was indeed Jewish. His subsequent statements about the matter — attesting that he still ate ham sandwiches, for example — appeared awkward, even to fellow Republicans.
This is just an aside for the benefit of the Allen campaign: the best way to convince people you are not an anti-Semite is not to brag about how many ham sandwiches you eat. Just saying.
But all this wasn’t enough for the Allen campaign because now we have former friends and colleagues coming forth to claim that Allen is a total shit-bag racist that loves to use the word nigger all the damn time. First it was former teammates from his college days. Then it was this:
One of the two old acquaintances, Christopher Taylor, now an anthropology professor at the Birmingham campus of the University of Alabama, said he heard Mr. Allen use an epithet to describe African-Americans in the early 1980’s.
Mr. Taylor, who is white and was then a graduate student at the University of Virginia, said the term had come up in a conversation about the turtles in a pond near Mr. Allen’s property. Mr. Allen, Mr. Taylor said, told him that “around here” the only people who “eat ’em” were African-Americans, whom he described with the notorious epithet for blacks.
I’m sure Mr. Taylor just felt like making shit up about turtle ponds. Right? And then last night on Hardball, Larry Sabato strongly hinted that he has first hand knowledge of Allen’s racism and assured Chris Matthews that the the sum and substance of the accusations against George Allen are true. The man is a flat out racist. (He’s also dumber than a bag of hammers). Sabato also defended his state, saying Virginia was the first and only state to elect an African-American as Governor, and stating that Allen’s brand of bullshit will not play. I hope not. I hope the next poll I see shows Jim Webb well ahead of George ‘Macaca’ Allen.
And why did the rest of the blogosphere start calling him Felix? I never got the memo. Also, if you want to amuse yourself, look at how the wingers try to shrug off Allen’s racism.
