Craaack

That noise you hear from the South is the roof falling in on Sen. George "Macaca Man" Allen. Dogged by his ridicule of a campaign worker for Democrat Jim Webb, which led to the four-handkerchief revelation of his mother's Jewishness, Allen has now been accused by two men of using "racial slurs" (as The New York Times delicately puts it) in the 1970's and '80's. The two accusers are an anthropologist and an anesthesiologist and both are white, so their reports have some built-in credibility. They also supply telling details.

Although Allen has denied using the N-word, none of this should come as a surprise. It has long been known that the Senator had a Confederate flag in his law office, as well as a noose (some have described claimed it to have been a lariat, but apart the difference is clear as day).

The Times' headline and lead actually plays down the seriousness of the latest revelation. The body of the story contains this passage:

"Mr. Shelton, a radiologist now living in North Carolina, said that on a hunting trip Mr. Allen had sought out the home of an African-American and affixed the head of a dead deer to the mailbox. He also said Mr. Allen had called him Wizard, for Robert Shelton, who used the title as a leader of the Ku Klux Klan."

The doctor also said that Sen. Allen told him that he had moved to Virginia "because the blacks know their place."

Even in the South, this kind of open racism does not play well, and that's likely to be especially true in increasingly-suburbanized Virginia.

The bad news is that, even without the racism, a mealy-mouthed opportunist like George Allen can be elected to high office.