Shelton said he also remembers a disturbing deer hunting trip with Allen on land that was owned by the family of Billy Lanahan, a wide receiver on the team. After they had killed a deer, Shelton said he remembers Allen asking Lanahan where the local black residents lived. Shelton said Allen then drove the three of them to that neighborhood with the severed head of the deer. “He proceeded to take the doe’s head and stuff it into a mailbox,” Shelton said. ~Salon

Now I should say at this point that I cannot recall the last time a politician has been subjected to this kind of piling on–though Trent Lott is probably the best precedent for the inquisitio that has been going on–and you have to know that people who routinely make bigoted, outrageous, hateful statements about Christians or particularly Catholics, the secular liberal target of choice, are never scrutinised, mocked or disrespected to the degree that someone accused of racism is.  Mormons are also usually fair game for a good bigoted joke or two, and nobody will think twice about a politician making such a joke. 

Of course the obsession with Allen’s prejudices is advantageous for the Democrats, their exploitation of it opportunistic and cynical, and the missteps of the last two months by Allen have been the kind of self-inflicted injuries that every politician dreams his opponent will cause to himself.  The unbalanced, obsessive anti-prejudice crusade of some modern journalists is tiresome and destructive–it is the worst of thought-policing and liberal neo-Puritanism all rolled into one.  The fascination with what Allen said among friends in his youth is in all likelihood the product of a warped mind that must ferret out and purify the body politic like a latter-day Jacobin.  Allen may not come out looking particularly good, but the people intent on digging up his peccadilloes appear almost crazed in their pursuit of these typically minor, irrelevant aspects of his character. 

All that being said, if the story told above about the doe’s head is true, there was clearly something rather wrong with George Allen and there probably still is something wrong with him.  It’s as if he has aspired to embody the worst stereotypes about Southerners while embodying few or none of the good qualities that are representative of traditional Southern men. 

Let’s cut through it.  No normal person really cares about macaca, and few even really care that he didn’t want to talk about his Jewish ancestry (in truth, it is none of our business), and even fewer care whether he has a Confederate battle flag–which in itself is far from a demerit, but one of the few marks in the man’s favour in my book.  These are things for agitators and very vocal minorities within minorities to take an interest in.  Quite a few people will shrug if they hear that Allen used the word nigger, not because they approve of it but because they cannot see how it is that significant that someone used such language in private in his youth–and which he has apparently subsequently stopped using.  Incidentally, there is also nothing more tiresome than the precious habit, more common among preciously sensitive white people than among anyone else, of referring to this word as “the n-word”–which shows a decorum and restraint that they do not extend to the old profanities that carry equally crude and ugly meanings. 

What is so damning about all of these things for the man is that he is so thoroughly dishonest about all of it, refusing to own up to things that he evidently has done and has said.  By issuing another denial, which may have been discredited already, he further diminishes his credibility and comes off looking worse than he ever would have otherwise. 

It is ridiculous that things such as these are going to be the deciding factors in the Virginia Senate election, and it is a shame that the November vote will be a referendum on Allen’s indiscretions rather than his virtually criminal acquiescence in and support for an illegal, unconstitutional war of aggression and other usurpations by the executive branch.  In supporting this war, in failing to oppose the President in his various breaches of our fundamental law, he violated his oath to defend the Constitution, which ought to be a damned sight more important than anything he may have said or done back at UVA.  But, of course, in vapid modern America, his support of the criminal war is supposedly one of his political assets, while his youthful stupidity is what will cost him his re-election.  In light off this, does anyone really need me to recount all the reasons why modern democracy is a sham and a horrible way of running a government?