George Allen is Done

He's finished. Put a skewer in him.

He may get re-elected to the Senate, but his presidential aspirations blew away with this remark yesterday:

"This fellow here, over here with the yellow shirt, macaca, or whatever his name is. He's with my opponent. . . Let's give a welcome to macaca, here. Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia."



the washington post follows up:

"Depending on how it is spelled, the word macaca could mean either a monkey that inhabits the Eastern Hemisphere or a town in South Africa. In some European cultures, macaca is also considered a racial slur against African immigrants, according to several Web sites that track ethnic slurs."

It sounds like the Allen Campaign handled the firestorm with tact:

"But the apology, which came hours after Allen's campaign manager dismissed the issue with an expletive and insisted the senator has "nothing to apologize for," did little to mollify Webb's campaign or Sidarth, who said he suspects Allen singled him out because his was the only nonwhite face among about 100 Republican supporters . . ."Not many people in southwest Virginia would think it is derogatory," Griffith said. "I didn't have a clue what it meant, and I doubt Allen did, either."

Ah, but why would Allen say a word that was meaningless to him? For more on that we go to Tapped:

"Ryan Lizza makes a great point on George Allen’s "Macaque" slur. As of now, it's a weird term that few of us know, and Allen is seeking to capitalize on it by claiming that "I don't know what it means." Why'd he use a word he doesn't know? Because it sounds vaguely like "mohawk," a word that doesn't describe the target's haircut, but sounds enough like "macaque" that the Allen campaign has decided to make it the alibi (left unexplained is why Allen didn't just use the word "mohawk"). Here's the thing, as Lizza notes: Allen is one of the few people who actually would know the term "macaque." It's a French slur for North Africans. Allen's mother is French Tunisian -- yes, a North African -- and Allen speaks French. You stay classy, George."

The aforementioned Ryan Lizza of The New Republic is no stranger to George Allen's race issues.

The Washington Post, probably the most influential newspaper politics-wise, is all over this in an editorial entitled "George Allen's America."

The Washington Post is also all over this:


"They legislate and look good doing it! Sartorial multi-tasking was apparently enough to land Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. Joe Biden on Esquire's list of "The Best Dressed Men in the World 2006."

For the third year, the magazine selected 20 men "who get it exactly right." Obama was cited for his sober but well-tailored suits and "impeccable ties" -- but was outranked on the list by Biden, who was praised for power dressing that "unmistakably says 'authority' ": strong suits, bold ties, pocket squares, cuff links and chunky watches.

"This is unexpected and undeserved," Biden said Friday. "My dad was an elegant dresser, and he used to say, 'Anybody who can buy off the rack can't be that sophisticated.' "

How do you spell S-E-C-U-R-I-T-Y?

Security. War on Terror. These are the things the Republicans want to make the fall elections about. Well, they might want to also play up gay marriage and immigration. I'm not sure those are winners this year as the white house and congress haven't been able to address those issues to the satisfaction of their base.

Rove & Co. are already trying to spin the Lieberman flame out, suggesting Democrats are purging moderates and are unserious about combating terror. This is the kind of nonsense we've come to expect from former domestic policy adviser Rove, but why is Jacob Weisberg taking the bait?

The Weisberg piece is pretty noxious. The Vietnam analogies are tired, and the reason Vietnam split the party was that the war was a JFK, Johnson/Humphrey mess and Humphrey got the nomination. Plus his biggest challenger was assassinated. That's the stuff that will split a party. Not resolution votes.



You know Weisberg has gone way out in the blue when he states "Lieberman's opponents are not entirely wrong about the war." Yeah, you could say that. You could also say that they're not entirely right about the war, but they're a lot more right that Lieberman was/is. I don't know why Weisberg is still fighting the ghosts of Democratic past, but it's time to acknowledge that the left was pretty much right about the war.

So, Democratic primary voters have good reason to vote out hawkish incumbents, but that's not really happening. Michael Tomasky illustrates this today in Slate. And if the Dems were "purging" all moderates and hawks, how come Cynthia McKinney went down on the same day as Lieberman? Sounds to me like Democratic primary voters are disposing of flotsam from all sides of the spectrum.

As to what took down Lieberman, it was mostly the war. But it didn't help that he announced a month ago that if he lost the primary, he would run as an independent. That reaked of incumbency run amok. This entitlement to remain in office beyond the party's interest, telegraphed long before any votes were cast, may have cost him this close primary.

Besides his insufferable habit of attacking other Dems at the drop of a hat, and the unbearable self-righteousness, there are other reasons to vote Lamont.

William Greider's 2002 piece on Enron Democrats notes that "He frequently sermonizes on the moral failings of others, including other public figures. Meanwhile, he has shilled vigorously, sometimes venomously, for the very players who are new icons of corruption--major auditing firms, corporate executives who cashed stock options early while investors took a bath and, especially, those self-inflating high-tech companies in Silicon Valley that drove the stock-market bubble. As a New Democrat, Lieberman held the door for their escapades. His most important crusade was protecting the loopy accounting for corporate stock options. . . . Back in 1993, when the Financial Accounting Standards Board proposed to stop it, Lieberman went to war. "I believe that the global pre-eminence of America's vital technological industries could be damaged by the proposal," he warned. The FASB, he insinuated, was politically motivated or simply didn't grasp the bright promise of the New Economy. Lieberman organized a series of letters warning the accountants' board to stop its meddling. In the Senate, he mobilized a resolution urging the Securities and Exchange Commission to squelch the reform."

And Matt Taibi has some choice quotes in Rolling Stone from Lieberman's visit to a black church:

"He swoops in, tells a story about meeting Dr. King back in the day, shakes his head solemnly at the scourge of racism and then coasts to a Scripture-packed dismount.

'I hate the Sixties, and I'm tired of hearing about it—what have you done for me lately?' says Regina Meade, one of the churchgoers. She shakes her head. 'I lost a cousin in the war. Twenty-nine years old. What about that? What about that?'

Josh Marshall argues that the Lieberman's loss is a sign of a rift between Washington, the chattering class, and the voters.

Here's the Daily Show on Lieberman's bad week.

If you have any doubts about whether Lieberman's early exit was a good thing, check out what he said about the foiled terror plot:

"If we just pick up like Ned Lamont wants us to do, get out by a date certain, it will be taken as a tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to blow up these planes in this plot hatched in England. It will strengthen them and they will strike again."

Oy.

The Republican spin machine is busy this week, ready to pounce on the success of a British & Pakistani effort to foil a terrorist plot that was headed for the U.S. But Fred Kaplan points out that the British were able to get the upper hand due to an approach that the Bush administration eschews.

I'm unsure how this plays to the advantage of an administration who has tarnished our image around the muslim world (Iraq, Lebanon)and created more terrorists than I care to acknowledge. Blind hawkishness is not making our country safer, it's not working politically for the likes of Lieberman, but the punditry is still holding on tight. I can't quote it as I am subscriptionless, but David Brooks' latest column begins like this:

"A McCain-Lieberman Party is emerging because of deep trends that are polarizing our politics."

These two media darlings do not have the answers for our current struggle.

Matthew Yglesias tears them down to size: "Are there any Republicans whose national security views are clearly more hawkish than McCain's? I can't think of any. For that matter, are there any Republicans whose national security views are clearly more hawkish than Lieberman's? I can't think of any either. Of the politicians who seem to have clear convictions on the topic, these are, I think, the two leading militarists in the United States Senate. The only way you can get McCain-Lieberman as representing a "center" position on foreign policy is if you define the extreme conceptual right-wing pole as "whatever George W. Bush happens to think,” making any criticism of his policies a move to the left. In practice, however, both men's difference with Bush almost exclusively amount to the (frankly, absurd) view that he's been unduly hesitant to unleash military force."

Lieberman & McCain. Foreign policy extremists. If this is the direction we follow post-Bush . . .

Regina Meade gets the last word.

"I lost a cousin in the war. Twenty-nine years old. What about that? What about that?"