Updated January 18, 2008: In the final poll of the race, a new SurveyUSA poll shows Democrat Jim Webb breaking away from Republican Looks like George Allen and leading him by an amazing 7 points. I call this one for Webb, but it will be close.
Looks like Republican super-racist Senator George Allen from Virginia, locked in a tight race with conservative Democrat and former Republican Secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan Jim Webb, spit (possibly tobacco juice) on his first wife.
The woman is named Anne Waddell and she now lives in La Jolla, California. Originally Anne Rubel, she was an aspiring model and actress at the time of the marriage. She filed for divorce a few days after Allen's re-election to Congress in 1983,
In the proceedings, Waddell said that Allen spit at her when he disagreed with something she wanted to do. He was the stereotypical controlling husband who refused to let his wife have a life of her own.
Other, poorly documented rumors imply that he also beat Waddell, but these need confirmation. As we shall see below, this portrayal of Allen as a disgusting punk fits into a general pattern of Allen's bullying, domineering, sadistic character.
This allegation is in the couple's divorce proceedings, which have been sealed by court officials for no apparent reason. Sealed divorce papers are usually sign of bad news - a really nasty divorce, at least.Court proceedings are usually sealed for two reasons - to protect the kids and to protect large financial fortunes. Neither is relevant in George Allen's case.
The allegation is reportedly coming not from Democratic Party operatives, but from people upset by Allen's disgusting attacks on his opponent, Jim Webb's Vietnam War novels (more on that below).
The spitting allegation got a lot of airplay last week when, on Halloween, Mike Stark, a liberal Virginia activist and blogger (Calling All Wingnuts is his blog), was assaulted as he approached Allen after a campaign rally and asked him some pointed questions.
First Stark asked if Allen would comment on his rumored arrest record from the 1970's. As Allen's thuggish redneck goon-aides grabbed Stark and maneuvered him towards the door, Stark hollered out, "Why did you spit on your first wife, George?" The Allen staffer then said, "Now you're getting personal", and tackled Stark to the floor.
This is clearly a pretty outrageous overreaction on the part of Allen's staff. Afterwards, Allen refused to apologize, saying, "These things happen". This incident reveals the thuggish mindset of Allen and his supporters that I will delve into in the rest of this post. It's not just a nasty political campaign, it's a whole cracker way of thinking.
According to Digby, Allen has always been a spitter. From the Washington Post:
Allen's personal style is similarly distinctive. He drinks beer mixed with orange juice and signs personal notes with the salutation, "Spit, George." Washington Post, Dec. 31, 1995As noted below, while at the University of Virginia, he had a habit of spitting tobacco everywhere, including the walls and floors of the interior of buildings. There is additional circumstantial evidence that George Allen may well have spit on his ex-wife - he apparently has a habit of spitting on women just to be a sexist prick.
Swing State Project notes that five separate women have come forward and noted that Allen spit tobacco juice at their feet. So George Allen likes to spit at women's feet. I wonder what a psychoanalyst would do with ammo like that and Allen on his couch?
Here, a former reporter from a southwestern Virginia daily newspaper noted in her Daily Kos Diary that about 10 years ago then-Governor George Allen spit tobacco juice at her feet as she tried to interview him at a political rally. The New Republic's Ryan Liazza reports on an Allen campaign rally, where, at the end of the rally, a female fan approached Allen for an autograph and he spit tobacco juice at her shoes.
Another woman, Sarah Carter, granddaughter of Jimmy Carter, reported in her Daily Kos Diary that her little sister, just a child, went with her mother and a friend to a parade several years ago where Allen made an appearance. As her mother was talking to Allen, he spit tobacco juice on the girl's shoes. So, George Allen spits on little girls. Boo! Hiss! What's wrong with this guy anyway?
In the fourth case, a female Democratic Party worker reported in Bristol Herald Courier that Allen spit at her shoes when she and another worker went to one of his rallies several years ago.
Another man reports here that Allen spit on his wife at the opening of the notorious Red Onion State Prison which Allen opened. That prison would soon become one of the most racist and abusive in the US and was even written up by Human Rights Watch.
So there you have it, the guy is a bully who expresses his petty, disrespectful, contemptuous attitude towards women in part by spitting at them. Apparently, his own wife was the recipient of Allen's sexist expectoration assault.
Later on in this piece we will note that Allen is a bully and a racist. As you can see, he is also a sexist. A little-known fact is that racists are often sexists, and both tend to be bullies. The bullying mindset is the catalyst for the racist and sexist behavior towards the "inferior" sex and races.
As long as we are delving into skeletons in Allen's closet, how about asking about the two arrest warrants issued for George Allen in Albermale County, Virginia, in 1974 while he was a student at the University of Virginia?
The records have been purged and efforts to look into the matter are not leading anywhere. We need some enterprising bloggers and investigators to dig into this and put it out on the web for all to see.
Now, I normally do not delve into political sleaze, as that is the territory of sleazy, crooked Bush Republican criminals, liars and scoundrels. I'm not sure about an afterlife, but I still believe in playing fair, which is possibly why my income is $12,000/yr.
Furthermore, it pretty quickly turns you into a Bush Republican-style hypocrite, whereby one decries behavior in the other side and is silent or cheers the same behavior on one's own side. Personally, I would rather vote for a Democratic criminal than a Republican choirboy any day of the week, since I vote on ideology, not character.
Ideally, though, the Democratic Party should not run the scoundrel and ought to find another candidate instead. But negative campaigning works, and the Bush Republicans are diving into the mud puddle, so it's time to sling some mud ourselves.
Anyway, George Allen wants to play hardball.
He is bringing up Jim Webb's novels about the military in the Vietnam War, in which Jim tossed in plenty of salacious sex scenes, including a scene where a Cambodian man puts his 4-year-old son's penis in his mouth. Although this is child molestation in the US, it is normative behavior in Cambodian culture.
The novels are about the horrors of the Vietnam War, and the sex scenes are in the context of disturbing sex acts that soldiers witnessed while over in Nam. Novels endorsed by John McCain, no less, and the Commandant of the US Marine Corps, who has put Webb's Fields of Fire on the recommended reading list for Marine officers.
Let us note that Jim wrote those novels, intended for an audience of US military men, veterans and armchair warriors, while a highly-respected Republican war hero, a man who actually served in the Vietnam War.
At the time the novels were written by Republican Jim Webb, they were hailed by Republicans across the board. Nary a Republican peep was heard about how they might be pornographic, let alone child pornography.
Webb served in the Fifth Marine Regiment in Vietnam, where as a rifle platoon and company commander in the infamous An Hoa Basin west of Danang, he was wounded and was awarded the Navy Cross, the Silver Star Medal, two Bronze Star Medals, and two Purple Hearts. Webb's son is over in Iraq right now, even as Webb opposes the war.
Webb switched parties out of disgust for the Iraq War Fiasco and now suddenly the GOP, which knew of his novels all along and in fact hailed them, is suddenly outraged by them? Let us also note that George Allen, a typical Republican neoconservative chicken hawk, never served in any war.
Not that the Gay Old Party (GOP) ever cared about sex scenes anyway, whether involving Lynn Cheney's lesbian sex scenes in her novels or Scooter Libby's and Bill O'Reilly's disgusting sex scenes in their novels (similar to Webb's) or Mark Foley's real-life sex scenes with underage Congressional pages.
The press is noting that the Allen-Webb campaign is the nastiest in the country. Indeed it is.
George Allen says he wants to make this election about character? No problem, we can fight dirty too. Let's go smear for smear. Call out the swift boats. George Allen wants to fight dirty? Pound him to the ground and bloody his nose! Just like the child, high school and college bully he once was.
Yes, George Allen was a bully as a child, adolescent and young man.
As a child, George Allen was the prototypical child bully. When his siblings refused to go to bed on time, he attacked them with a furious sadism. He dragged his sister upstairs by her hair, he threw his brother Bruce through a sliding glass door and he broke his brother Gregory's collarbone. He slammed a pool cue on his sister's new boyfriend Flynn's head.
He dangled his sister over the railing at Niagara Falls, threatening to throw her over the falls, and leaving her with a permanent fear of heights. His sister, Jennifer (Allen) Richard even wrote a memoir of growing up in the ultra-dysfunctional, traditional-values, conservative Allen family, Fifth Quarter, The Scrimmage of a Football Coach's Daughter.
In the book, she discussed her childhood and portrayed her brutal treatment at the hands of her brother. The book quotes Allen says he wants to grow up to be a dentist so he can make people suffer.
While an upper-caste "lone cowboy" White student at uber-rich Palos Verdes High School, he spray-painted "Die Whitey" and "Burn, Baby Burn" on the walls before a football game with a black team.
His high school yearbook shows him and his best friend with Confederate flag pins in their lapels, he drove around with Confederate flag bumper stickers on his Mustang and plastered the school with Confederate flag bumper stickers.
What makes all of this even more bizarre is that Allen did not grow up in the South at all - in fact, he was born in Whittier, California, grew up in Chicago, and for the most part, Rancho Palos Verdes.
That a Southerner might have an obsession with Dixie is understandable if not commendable. That a native Southern California boy with no connection whatsoever to the South would develop such an obsession is strange and deeply disturbing.
Football was more than an obsession to star high school quarterback George. The Green Bay Packers fan lived near the Allen home in Rancho PV. Every morning, George and his brothers would drive by the Packers fan's home and smash down their mailbox with a baseball bat. The family would put the mailbox back up, and George and his brothers would smash it down again the next day.
After high school, the family moved to Virginia, where he enrolled at the University of Virginia, swaggered through hallways where fellow students reportedly "gave him a wide berth", spitting tobacco juice everywhere - on the walls, floors and elevators, and often shouldering other students aside.
While on the football team in college in Virginia, he used the word "nigger" habitually, thousands of times according to teammates, and once put a deer's head in the mailbox of a Black family.
Now, we Christians believe in repentance. Some bullies (supposedly) repent from their bullying childhoods, though I am not sure if I have ever met one. George Allen has not repented.
In his first run for office, he stated proudly that he had supported the candidacy two years prior of a Democrat who had led Virginia's resistance to civil rights in the 1960's. In the same race, he stumped against a redistricting plan that aimed to elect the first Black Virginia Congressman. He lost in '79, but won in '82 by a razor-think 25 votes.
Most of the bills he sponsored dealt with "crime" and "welfare", code words for attacking Black people and rousing White racism against Blacks. The crime part of the equation was part of a deliberately White Racist anti-Black "War On Crime" strategy introduced by Richard Nixon.
As a Virginia state legislator in 1984, he was one of only 27 legislators to vote against making Martin Luther King Day a state holiday. He was also upset that the holiday would fall on the same day that Virgina sets aside to "honor" Confederate insurgent heroes Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.
Also as a legislator, he co-sponsored legislation to commemorate the passing of William Munford Tuck, a radical segregationist who opposed every civil rights bill while in Congress in the 1950's and promised "massive resistance" to the 1954 Supreme Court decision banning segregation.
In 1993, Allen decided to run for governor of Virginia. You can see it in his very first campaign ad. That flag again. Stars and bars, the Confederate flag.
As governor, he refused to join the NAACP when they asked him to join, called Martin Luther King an extremist, cut the number of Blacks on the governor's staff by 50% and proudly proclaimed Confederate Heritage Month. The text of the proclamation celebrated the South's violent insurgency against the United States but did not say one word about slavery.
He proudly accepted a membership in a Richmond social club with a reputation for discrimination - an invitation the previous three governors had refused. He replaced the only Black member on the University of Virginia Board of Visitors with a white member.
Shall we forget all the character stuff, and "campaign on the issues", as liar and fool Allen keeps insisting we do? Fine. George Allen votes with his fellow faux cowboy George Bush 97% of the time and has always supported the Iraq War unequivocally until a last minute (Death bed?) conversion in the waning days of this election.
Love George Bush and the Iraq War? Fine, vote for the gross pig, sick puppy, rich brat, bullyboy, hoodlum and snob George Felix Macaca. Excuse me, George Felix Macacawitz (he's Jewish, after all).
Disgusted by the war and Disaster in Chief George Bush? Maybe you should consider voting against George Allen, the living embodiment of the catastrophes of the war and Administration.
This year, he called an Indian-American Webb staffer, S.R. Siddath, who was filming an Allen campaign rally, a macaca, French North African slur for a Black person that Allen learned from his French-Tunisian Jewish mother (a very disturbing video of that incident is here).
The obscure lineage of macaca sent reporters scurrying and led to them digging into Allen's mother past, which led to the revelation that she was Jewish (more on that below). As an attorney in private practice, he kept a hangman's noose hanging on a ficus tree in his law office. At his home, he hung a Confederate flag in his living room, which he proudly displayed to visitors.
He continued his tobacco chawing and spitting habit while governor of Virginia, often missing the spitoon in his office and hitting the floor. Allen advocates tattooing homosexuals on the forehead, supposedly so they cannot spread AIDS to unsuspecting sex partners.
Recently it turned out that the redneck good ol' boy and fundamentalist Christian George Allen is actually Jewish by Jewish law (his Jewish mother, a child of Tunisian Jews, who tried to protect her children from racism by keeping their heritage from them).
Initially, Allen acted ashamed of his Jewish heritage and tried to either deny it or change the subject.
One of his first comments was to accuse those who asked if he was Jewish of "casting aspersions" on him. The definition of "casting aspersions" means to criticize a person or the person's character or to say that a person or their character is bad.
The disturbing conclusion is that Allen thinks that opponents who say Allen is Jewish are criticizing his character and saying he is a bad person. As if being Jewish in and of itself is a bad thing or a blot on one's identity! The next day, he admitted that he was Jewish, but then noted that he had just eaten a ham sandwich that day (not the most sensitive way to respond when you finally find out you are Jewish).
Allen recently made a cameo appearance in the lousy movie Gods and Generals, a Confederacy love memo about the heroic Confederate generals who led the war to keep niggaz as human pets. In the movie, Allen sings, "Hurrah, hurrah, for Southern Rights, hurrah!" Southern rights means the right to keep Black folks as human slaves.
In general, this cameo movie appearance means nothing. But put it all together and connect the dots, and you do the math.
George Allen is disgusting.
He is a disgrace to Virginia and to America. People who spit tobacco juice on others are disgusting. People who insult the race of others in public are disgusting. George Allen is disgusting. He was an embarrassment to Virginia as a Governor and he's an embarrassment as a Senator.
George Allen is an abuser and a sadist, imbued with a grotesque sense of entitlement to the point of having narcissistic and sociopathic tendencies.
Clearly, he is playing into the rampant, outrageous racism that continues to plague the US South.
We have already had eight years of a cowboy with a mean streak running our country. Do we really need to tolerate any more of them? One wonders why the Republican Party runs such obvious scoundrels with damaged goods as George Bush and George Allen for major offices as Southern faces of the Republican Party to grab the redneck vote.
Then the shocking realization becomes clear. Bush and Allen are typical Southern Republicans. Probably most of the decent Southerners are Democrats by now.
Allen is emblematic of the Republican Party as a whole, its politicians and its voters, and the sad, sick monstrosity that they have transformed into of late, especially since 1994. The Republicans were not always this way. A Nixon, Ford, Eisenhower, Romney, Jacob Javits, Lindsay or even Goldwater (hey, at least he had ethics) Republican would be manna from Heaven these days.
For my non-American readers, the Confederate flag is now a symbol of White racism against Blacks in the US. The Confederate flag represented the US Confederacy, a collection of Southern states who tried to split away from the US, principally so they could continue to keep Black people as slaves! If you can believe that.
Now, these Blacks gave Whitey down South every nickel he ever made. And White Southerners cared so much about these Blacks of theirs that they actually went to war and damn near tore this nation apart just so they could continue keeping them as human house pets and field animals. Then they had the audacity to hate these very human "animal companions" to whom they owned every dime they ever made!
Excuse me if I am not totally sympathetic with US White Southern racism against Blacks. Despite racist rhetoric, Blacks are not genetically defective and are capable of civilized behavior in modern Western society. Put a suit and tie on a Black man, give him a good job, treat him with respect and dignity, and watch him become a model citizen.
However, Blacks, as a group, have made some serious errors since Reconstruction, their one great chance to break free of tyranny and move into US society as full-fledged citizens. Granted, they were subjected to horrible institutionalized violence for over a century, but still...that's no excuse for the uncivilized behavior and rampant criminality of so many of the US Black underclass.
If, as a group, US Blacks behaved more like Chinese-Americans, I doubt if most people would hate them very much.
But the continuing irrational racism of the White cracker rednecks down South has not helped matters either.
For a fantastic article about the South after the Civil War until the Civil Rights era, with a focus on Black-White relations, carrying a general tone of "My God, how did these White Southerners ever get this way?", check out "Mississippi, The Past That Has Not Died" by Walter Lord from American Heritage Magazine in June 1965.
It's an engrossing article, great reading for any American, and essential reading for any non-American who wants to understand US race relations, the destruction of the South in the Civil War, post-Civil War Reconstruction, the Civil Rights Era, the subsequent rise of the Republican Party in the South, etc.
Non-Americans - understand now - when a Southern white man with racist tendencies hangs a hangman's noose in his office, the message is clear. This noose represents the nooses that were used to lynch Blacks in the US. Lynching in the US began in the South as means of frontier justice to hang Abolitionists (those opposed to slavery) and those assisting runaway slaves.
After the Civil War, when the US imposed a radical Reconstructionist government on the South in an effort to drag it away from caveman racism and White Supremacism into the norms of 19th Century America, it was used against the Whites sent down to the South to help civilize the Southern barbarians (called carpet-baggers by Southerners).
Reconstruction ended in 1876 and White Supremacists took back control over the South. Lynching gradually came back, and by the early 1900's, it was used by the Ku Klux Klan, a radical White Supremacist group who reformed in 1915 with a vengeance, to socially, economically and politically terrorize Blacks who "stepped out of line".
In Richmond, Virginia there is a street lined with statues of "Confederate traitors", the last being Arthur Ashe, a black tennis star from the 1970's. Ashe's statue has predictably been vandalized. For far too many White Southerners, their heritage means the Confederacy, its generals and soldiers. This is the South that the yahoo, smug thug and bad joke George Allen represents.
They tell us that the South has changed. In this election, we will see if it is true.
Meanwhile, pssst. George Allen spit on his first wife. Pass it around.
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