Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Hakuna Macaca

[update 8/16 5:29 PM PDT: Yeah, I updated the post title. Had to beat The Daily Show to the obvious.]

No sooner did I mention in passing the stain on Virginia's junior senator seat better known as George Felix Allen, and the guy goes and shows his true colors once again.

Webb's campaign distributed to reporters a video clip of Allen's remarks about Sidarth, a 20-year-old University of Virginia senior who spent last week videotaping Allen's "listening tour" for the Webb campaign.

"This fellow over here with the yellow shirt _ Macaca or whatever his name is _ he's with my opponent," Allen said. "He's following us around everywhere."

After mentioning that Webb was in California on a fundraising trip, Allen exhorted the crowd: "Let's give a welcome to Macaca here. Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia."

Sidarth, who was born and raised in Fairfax County, has said he felt Allen was singling him out because he was the only nonwhite in the audience, but an Allen campaign spokesman said not all of the rest of the crowd was white.



Anyone familiar with Felix' history knows the guy is a stone cracker racist anyway, and always has been.

The AP article in the Post has a relatively benign take on all that, natch.

Allen has been accused of racial insensitivity before. He wore a Confederate flag pin in his high school yearbook photo, used to keep a Confederate flag in his living room, a noose in his law office and a picture of Confederate troops in his governor's office, but has said he has grown since then.


He's "grown"? Grown what -- a patch of hair between his shoulder blades? A third nipple? A new lynchin' tree?

Allen is the worst sort of chickenshit thug anyway. Once he realized that he could appeal to the mossback vote just enough to keep getting elected, he just kept on aw-shucksing his way through the old confederacy districts that still infest certain pockets of the South. You know the sort, assholes who insist that civil rights legislation was an unnecessary imposition by those do-gooders in Washington, that the South would have ended segregation on their own. I don't know what is wrong with such people, but it'd be nice if they'd do the world a favor and die already.

What's really cool about this "macaca" thing is how Felix and his campaign have managed to concoct three completely different excuses in just 24 hours, each of them moronically implausible. First they said that Felix was really saying "mohawk", making a jest about Sidarth's hairstyle -- except it's not remotely a mohawk, nor did what Felix said sound remotely like "mohawk". Then Felix said that one of his staffers had told him that Sidarth's name was "macaca". Then Felix said that he, Felix, had himself made up the name "macaca", and that it had no meaning.

Except it does, especially among French and Belgians wishing to express disdain with African blacks or Arabs. And coincidentally enough, Felix' mother is French of Tunisian descent, and lived for some time in Tunisia.

It's time for Felix to stand up and either claim or repudiate his long history of racial insensitivity idiocy, once and for all. Of course he can't do that without alienating the mossbacks, but he's going to have plenty of chances over the next twelve weeks.

Governor Allen, a Republican in the last year of a four-year term, urged residents on Wednesday to salute the state's ''four-year struggle for independence and sovereign rights'' during the Civil War and to respect ''the honorable sacrifices of Confederate leaders, soldiers and citizens to the cause of liberty.''



I hope James Webb dogs Felix with that one right to the bitter end. Virginians are going to have to decide if that's the kind of despicable nonsense they stand for or not. Felix knew exactly what he was saying; it fits the pattern. It's time for Felix to find out that the "real world" and "America" don't stand for cheap race-baiting anymore, and have no use for animals who long for the days when Jesse Helms could stand behind Carole Moseley-Braun and whistle "Dixie".

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