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Allen should 'fess up and be done with it.

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Stray Pooch:
Hi everyone!  Nice new format.  I can't spend as much time as I used to (by far) but I thought I'd drop in and toss up this tidbit.

OK, so for those who may not know me, I'm a Republican, but I am not a wingnut.  I live here in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia and we are dealing with Senator Allen's "macaca" comment and now the accusations about use of the "N" word back in his younger days.  Now let me make this clear:  I don't buy for a moment that these accusations are anything but an attempt to unseat a Republican in a red state.  I was talking to our local Dem party worker and he told me that negative campaigning was perfectly OK.  It's not his party's job to try to make our candidate look good.  Spoken like a true Clintonite.  Of course, Repubs are just as guilty of negative campagining and some around here may recall that as the reason I voted Dem last governor's race.

But having said all that, and in spite of the motivation behind the accusations, I'd bet my bippie (age alert!) that the Senator said it.  Come on, is it really a surprise that a southern boy used non-PC terms to describe those of African descent in his youth?  The Dems next door (West VA) have a full-fledged KKK boy in their Senate seat. And they get a whole lotta pork out of that particular barrel.  If Allen is using the "N" word now - THAT's news.  I say dump him and be done.  But if he did idiotic things in his youth, who didn't?  Our generation is the one that finally made racism (and not just discrimination) ugly and unacceptable.  Our parents grew up racist and taught it to us.  We are teaching our kids not to believe that nonsense.  At some point, there has to be a transistional generation in any social change.  Ours was that generation.  That means we started out doing things like using the "N" word and making racial jokes when we were kids (Yeah, I did it.).  But we ultimately rejected that idea and started thinking clearly about racial differences.   It's something to be proud of, yet we are ashamed of it.  If we were cancer survivors or had gone throught the great depression like our parents and grandparents we wouldn't be ashamed to talk about our troubles.  But nobody wants to admit learning - and practicing - racism (even the subtle kinds) as a kid. 

I started losing respect for Bill Clinton (as opposed to just disagreeing with him) when he made that idiotic comment about not inhaling.  Of course he inhaled - and who cares.  I personally never did pot, but most of my friends did. (I was just scared of Dad finding out - thanks, Dad!).  He could have said he spent the seventies high and I wouldn't have had a problem with it.  But he tried to fudge it by appealing to the "cool" crowd without losing the "straight" vote.  Screw that!  Tell the truth and be damned.  Allen is doing the same thing here.  I think if he just came out and 'fess up this nonsense would get behind him.  He should say something like, "Look, I said and did some ignorant, terrible things back in my old college days.  I know it was wrong now, and I'm truly sorry.  But back then, it's the way everybody I knew talked and felt.  We had to get over that and we have.  I hope those I offended back then and now can find some peace in my coming, even belatedly, to an understanding of how wrong what I did was.   But I do not intend to leave this race because someone has brought up old mistakes."    The Dems would be disarmed, most people would forgive and move on, and we could get to some OTHER issues (such as who the candidates are sleeping with and whether they wear boxers of briefs). 

Anyway, nice to see you all.  I'll probably get to spend a bit more time here in a few weeks when I go off to a school for a week.  Have a good one, Saloonies!  :D

BT:
Looks like Webb has some splainin to do also:

Webb Denies Ever Using Word as Epithet
Racial Slur Overshadowing All Else in Contest

By Michael D. Shear
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 28, 2006; B01



RICHMOND, Sept. 27 -- Democratic Senate candidate James Webb on Wednesday sought to explain remarks he had made a day earlier, in which he refused to say whether he had used the "N-word," but he insisted he has never used it as a racial epithet aimed at anyone.

"I don't think that there's anyone who grew up around the South that hasn't had the word pass through their lips at one time in their life," he told the Richmond Times-Dispatch on Tuesday. "If you read 'Fields of Fire,' that word and a lot of other words are in the book." "Fields of Fire" is a novel Webb wrote about the Vietnam War.

Spokeswoman Kristian Denny Todd said Webb, an author and former Marine, "did not want to make any blanket statements that he has never, ever uttered the word. Jim has not used the word directed at another person. He's never used it himself as a racial slur."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/27/AR2006092702062_pf.html

Plane:
  I grew up in the south , with a Mama that taught me never to be so impolite.

   No I don't use the N word , tho I am bemused at times at its power .


   Hurry back SP and tell us how the school was .

Lanya:
Yay Straypooch!
Have been missing you.  Hugs.

Michael Tee:
Good to see you back, Pooch.

You've got a point, or maybe a quarter-point, about what Allen did in his youth.  Maybe EVERYONE used the N-word back then.   But did everyone put a severed deer head in a black family's mailbox?  And the "macaca" incident which started the whole thing was not exactly back somewhere in Allen's distant past, was it? 

IMHO, a lot of Virginia voters will probably stay with Allen because they think like him and despise or resent blacks, but are too smart to say so in public.  They want to be "politically correct," as does Allen himself, when he's not being careless about it, but in the anonymity of the polling booth, they will soothe the wounds of the man they think is being crucified, somewhat hypocritically, for a careless or unguarded moment. 

If the white voters of Virginia really gave a shit about blacks or the fight against racism, George Allen by now would be dead in the water.  His opponent would have opened a 40-point lead.  The fact is, his worst sin, in the eyes of most white Virginians, is a breach of social convention - - a convention whose sole value is preventing them from looking like the racists that almost all of them are.

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