Wow.
George Allen stepped in a big pile of macaca, it appears.
Daily Kos' Jeffrey Feldman lays it out, with a lot more analysis than any sane person would want to read, much less write.
And read the comments on that post. Amazing.
The Democrats DESERVE whatever nutjob they are going to select. I'm sure they will apply the same "analysis" to the speech of their own candidates, not just poor George A.
This is just an assassination. You can't seriously believe that Allen intentionally used a word he knew to be racist. You can say he should know that macaca is a racist word, before he uses it, but the theory that it is coded signal to white supremacists is such a paranoid fantasy that Oliver Stone would laugh out loud.
But...c'mon. Mit Romney uses the phrase "tar baby" and gets pounded for that? The important thing is that tar is sticky, not that it is black. My man Saunders has the correct view of that little affair.
I agree George Allen made a dumb mistake. And I also understand that if I were the dark-skinned fellow who got called the name, I might not be so placid about this. But for all the white boys to jump on Allen in a holier-than-thou fury is just....well, it's just about all the Democratic party has come to represent. Instead of policy initiatives, they give us speech police. Daily Cause needs to work a bit more on what the Republicans do, rather than what they say.
3 comments:
Only one problem with your analysis: George Allen uses the label of the other half of the Republicrats. So he's fair game for the Kossites.
Now, if the bigot were (say) Ned Lamont... well, silence would be the watchword.
Actually, I was probably just confused. Is it just the partisan divide that created the attack?
Or would a similar faux pas have been treated the same way if a Dem had done it?
One could say that a Dem would NOT have done it, and that's the point.
And, maybe it is.
A few things worth noting....
(1) Aside from the use of the word "macaca", there's also the "welcome to America" part of the remark--kid has brown skin so the Senator assumes he's a furriner, despite the fact that he was apparently born and raised in Fairfax.
(2) It appears that Sen. Allen was a great waver of the "Confederate" flag in his teen years in Southern California. This was at a point in history when that flag was undeniably associated with opposition to integration and voting rights.
(I put "Confederate" in quotes, because the X design on a non-square flag was not significantly used by the CSA; I have a friend, Southern as Southern can be, who feels that describing the rectangular one as the "Klan flag" gives a more appropriate description of its origin.)
DD
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