WHAT HAPPENS WHEN BIGOTS STOP BEING POLITE

George Allen, seen at right in the unused portrait for his Donruss Diamond Kings card, made things harder for himself this week by shooting out a racial slur at a Republican fundraiser. What's so shocking about that you say? Well unlike the hundreds of other racial slurs at Republican fundraisers across the nation this week, Allen said his into a microphone.

S.R. Sidarth, a Virginia-raised, UVA educated supporter of Jim Webb, Allen's Democratic rival in the Senate race, was welcomed by Allen to America and "the real world of Virginia" and addressed as "macaca." Sidarth is of Indian descent, and macaca is a common racial epithet in a number of African and Asian countries. So at least Mr. Allen manages to be cosmopolitain in his bigotry. The name may also have been a reference to the macaque money, which displays Allen's broad understanding of tropical ecology alongside his back-woods podunk prejudice.

Like his old pal Mitt Romney, Allen played the naivete card on the remark, claiming not to know what "macaca" meant , and offering that it was a reference to Sidarth's mohawk haircut. The haircut gambit is a no-go, obviously, and the naivete only makes things worse, I would say.

If Allen was unaware of the import of his slur, that means that he was spontaneously able to locate, through the universe's great spheres of racial hatred, an appropriate remark with which to denigrate this young man. If you balk at the mystic rationale, you might simply conclude that Allen is such a sharp racist tack that he managed to pull something plenty hurtful - and vintage hateful through its monkey reference heritage - out of the thin Virginia air.

In addition, the New York Times reports:

In 1984, as a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, Mr. Allen opposed a state holiday honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. After being elected governor in 1993, he issued a proclamation honoring Confederate History Month. He also kept a Confederate battle flag in his home, according to The Almanac of American Politics.

This is bad for Mr. Allen, and should haunt his 2008 aspirations. But let's be fair; it's not like he kicked off his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, known only for the savage murders of three Civil Rights protestors. And it's not like his next stop was Stone Mountain, Georgia, birthplace of Jefferson Davis the Confederate President who he referred to as "one of my heroes." He's not a monster.

That was Reagan that did that.

In the end, the real tragedy here is not young Sidarth, who gets to be an awkward martyr for his own campaign, nor is it Mr. Allen's political pursuit, which was already a tragedy. The true sting is felt by me, a proud Virginian living in the North East, who must now further confront the stigma of Allen's so-called "real world of Virginia."