GEORGE ALLEN IS BAD BUT HE'S REALLY JUST A FRAT BULLY DUMBY
THE (WORSE) BAD GUYS ARE THOSE WHO CYNICALLY DEPLOY HATE THEY DON'T PERSONALLY SHARE AS A VOTE-GETTER

What was George Allen thinking when he gave the Confederate flag billboard space in his life? Doesn't he watch PBS? (I just did)

Supposedly the thing "did not adorn his home after 1992."

Adorn?

Of course, he was thinking something: His flag-flirtings began in high school and
college (in California!), as dumb, misdirected anti-establishment brattiness. I know this type of guy, there are some in NJ with bad flags on their Jeeps. They need emergency history lessons ("Just 40 years ago, dumb ass") driven home with righteous knuckles.

Allen transferred from UCLA to Virginia where he could continue his reactionary rebellion, get more earnestly racist. Then George grew up into a Republican politician and realized his flag fetish dovetailed well with the confederate code of the continuing Southern Strategy: drop hints and symbols for the soft bigots to let them know you're on their team. Get elected Governor with C-flag hints, then three times proclaim April Confederate History and Heritage Month, and call the Civil War "a four-year struggle for independence and sovereign rights."

Soft bigots are the large remnants of the big block of people freaked out, starting around '64, by efforts like the MFDP to reform the Democratic party's racist machine in the South; they all bolt to the Republicans blah blah, etc. Everybody knows this. So how can anybody not be honest about what the current Republican majority is built on? It's not the McCain types: even John has compromised himself for some fence-sitters by making the commencement address at Liberty university, Jerry Falwell's place. He once called that guy "an agent of intolerance," now he's making a speech at his school; this is because the evangelical crew has the party by the balls. (The speech wasn't that bad though; it didn't pander to Christian weirdos particularly and encouraged Americans to "argue" about the Iraq war).

The Republican majority is built on the soft bigots plus the evangelicals. People with big hang-ups. These hang-ups are easily teased by wedge-issue deployment like fear of gays (fear of themselves-see Foley) and aforementioned confederate code. It's a visceral thing: how can you beat a party whose politics play on the physical power of the dark side of sex and race? They are going to make it to the polls. Liberals, generally not as hung-up and hence not as viscerally motivated, may be watching their Netflix Nov 4.

Besides this crazy core, of course, the Republicans do need all the McCains, the Lindsey Grahams, and the voters like them, the big deniers, to be a majority, and diffuse the ugliness. People with decent "moderate" sensibilities vote Republican thinkingits a vote for the McCain mold, refusing to get real and be disgusted by their Falwellian bedfellows. I'm sure though that those people would love to place a guiltless vote for Olympia Snowe or whoever untainted by association with a freaky national party. Can't the Lindsey Grahams see that people are yearning for the moderates to jettison they're creepy pals and form a still somewhat crappy but secular and sexually libertarian new party? Or are these moderates just not ready to abandon the wedge weapons that reliably keep their party in power?

Allen has to be buried, but only because he's a sloppy half-adult frat mess. People are coming out of the woodwork with stories of his youthful n-bomb drops! And mailbox stops! Amazing asshole. But others speaking the Confederate code, the more cynical users who actually aren't racist but know it's a good way to win over those who are, benefit from their winks to the initiated, and squeak through because they're smart.