Happy Halloween

C'mon, I can't be the only one who showed up to work this morning in a navy blue suit with a copy of Tiger Beat in one hand, 8 ounces of Jergens in the other, and a name tag that says Congressman Mark Foley maf54…can I? And why the weird looks that I brought my nephew to the office today?

The best YouTube since Drunken Aschlochs

Today I owe a debt of gratitude to the gang over at DoG for doing me a solid, Casey Kasem style. I never get sick of hearing a confirmed hypocrite/pedophile say "If I were, uh, one of these sickos, I'd be, uh, nervous with America's Most Wanted on my trail."

Damn, if irony isn't a bitch. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a busy day ahead of me IM'ing with maf54.

Macaca who?

I'm sure there's some real news going on today, some of which might even hold dire political ramifications for Republicans…but who's watching? Not me.

If you have only seen or heard tidbit, take five minutes to read the full chat transcript between Representative Mark Foley and an underage male page. The boy called it "sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick"…and he may have been understating things.

I bet someone wishes he just said the N-word…

In perhaps my favorite GOP pre-election scandal of the day, it seems that Florida Congressman Mark Foley is in trouble because of a series of alarmingly too-familiar e-mails he sent to a 16-year-old former page (yes, it was a male page, but the pedophile overtones are a lot more scandalous than the gay ones).

"I am in North Carolina," Foley wrote in one e-mail, "and it was 100 in New Orleans ...wow that's really hot...well do you miss DC...It's raining here but 68 degrees so who can argue...did you have fun at your conference...what do you want for your birthday coming up...what stuff do you like to do."

Eww…can't this dude get a MySpace page like all the other weirdos trolling for high school ass?

Sure, Foley's campaign is calling the story "a political attack and an attempt at the worst kind of character assassination", and they may very well prove to be correct. However, there is a bit of perverted ironic justice to the recent turn of events:

…if it turns out that there's anything to the allegations about Foley, the congressman has certainly provided his critics with plenty of hoisting-on-his-own-petard material. In remarks delivered on Internet Safety Day in 2004, Foley warned that the Internet "provides a new medium for pedophiles to reach out to our most vulnerable citizens -- America's children." And in an interview with National Public Radio back in 2002, Foley, who co-chairs the Congressional Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus, complained that the Supreme Court had "sided with pedophiles over children" when it struck down a child pornography law. "I'm not a prude," Foley said in the NPR interview. "I have no problem with adult pornography. People are entitled to read it, watch it, see it in their homes or in public accommodations. Where I have to draw the line is using children for the excitement of those more mature people who should know the difference and know better."

Seriously, where's the Capitol Hill SVU team when you need it? And why is Jim McGreevey applying for a job in Foley's office?

Next up – ‘but some of my best friends are gooks’

After the news broke about George Allen's use of "the N-word" in college, the Senator immediately and vociferously denied it as a partisan attempt to bring him down. On Monday he told the AP, "The story and…assertions in there are completely false."

What else was he going to say? "Yup, I hate them niggers. Spics too." The only big surprise was how quickly facts were uncovered that prove he's a liar.

In the heat of Macaca-Gate, Chris Taylor, a University of Alabama professor of anthropology, wrote to a colleague and detailed the Senator's past racism. Taylor's August 17 e-mail recalled his days as a University of Virginia grad student and how he met Allen while earning extra money doing publicity photo shoots:

I met him twice actaully [ sic]. I did two modelling [sic] jobs with his then wife and she told me about some puppies they were trying to give away. I told her I'd like to take one. So one evening I went out to their place in the country near [ Charlottesville] somewhere. There was a pond quite close by. I asked if they had any waterfowl landing there. George told me about the ducks and geese that sometimes landed there and about the ducks who tried to raise their young but who would have them all devoured by the big turtles in the pond. Well, why doesn't someone kill the turtles and eat them? I asked. George said 'only the niggers around here eat em.'

Just so you get the timeline right, Taylor sent this e-mail a full month before any other allegations surfaced about Allen using "the N-word", and the e-mail itself was made public by the receiver, not sender (this should diminish Allen's inevitable claims of a partisan conspiracy).

Is that all, Senator? You hate the browns , you hate the blacks and you seem to exhibit classic Jewish self-loathing (maybe instead of Felix we should call you George "Woody" Allen). You think being liberal is almost as bad as being able to read. You threw your own flesh and blood through a glass door. Are we leaving anyone or anything out? What's you take on kittens: kill or cuddle?

Felix's Faux Pas

The picture just keeps getting uglier for Senator George Felix Allen. While his racism came into national focus thanks to Macaca-Gate, it seems that his bigotry can be traced to the very beginning of his Virginia roots.

In case you need a refresher, the California-born mock redneck Allen infamously posed with a Confederate pin in his high school yearbook and later appeared in a campaign ad filmed at his home with the flag in the background. And then there's the matter of his record as a lawmaker. " As a member of the Virginia Legislature, Allen opposed a state holiday honoring Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. As Virginia's governor, Allen issued a proclamation honoring Confederate History Month that contained no mention of slavery."

But wait…there's more. Now, three of Allen's former University of Virginia football teammates have come forth with corroborating stories of the senator's racism:

"Allen said he came to Virginia because he wanted to play football in a place where 'blacks knew their place,'" said Dr. Ken Shelton, a white radiologist in North Carolina who played tight end for the University of Virginia football team when Allen was quarterback. "He used the N-word on a regular basis back then."

A second white teammate, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared retribution from the Allen campaign, separately claimed that Allen used the word "nigger" to describe blacks. "It was so common with George when he was among his white friends. This is the terminology he used," the teammate said.

A third white teammate contacted separately, who also spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of being attacked by the Virginia senator, said he too remembers Allen using the word "nigger," though he said he could not recall a specific conversation in which Allen used the term. "My impression of him was that he was a racist," the third teammate said.

To be fair, these allegations were made by only three of Allen's 19 former teammates interviewed by reporters. Some even claim the senator had " no prejudices, biases or anything else." And yet, there seems to be no political agenda driving the outing of the would-be Klansman/Senator. Shelton – the only named accuser – has a bipartisan voting record and has publicly supported Republican candidates. Why would he lie about a man he hasn't talked to in thirty years?

Here's the thing – I hate the whole "where there's smoke, there's fire" argument, but there are more fumes coming out of Allen's campaign than there are at a Phish concert. You may not believe that he liked/likes to use the word "nigger", or that he stuffed a dead dear's head into a black family's mailbox, or that he had heard the word "Macaca" at least once prior to using it to mock a brown-skinned employee of his opponent, or that he spoke fondly about imperial wizards of the Ku Klux Klan, or any other less-than-flattering story in the news. But the facts that we do know about this douchebag (zest for the Confederate Flag, white supremacist voting record, a noose hanging outside his law office) certainly make these new allegations a lot more believable, don't they?

Real American Douchebag

Nobody loves jumping on a bandwagon and beating a metaphorical horse to death as much as I do, but really, is there any new ground to cover about Macaca-Gate?

You're damn right there is.

What's first in the queue? How about the brutish and violent side of the Senator, most captivatingly recorded in a 2000 memoir written by Allen's sister, Jennifer Richard:

Richard's book contained some cartoonish, though alarming, accounts of violence at the Allen home. Richard remembers George, her older brother and the future senator, dragging her up the stairs by her hair. She remembers George breaking his brother Gregory's collarbone. She remembers George throwing her brother Bruce through a sliding glass door. At one point in the book, which was marketed as nonfiction, she says George spoke about dentistry as a perfect profession, because he wanted to be paid to "make people suffer."

(Why do I hear Steve Martin singing in my head?)

What else? Well, like any good Republican, the Senator is a hypocrite. At last week's rally, Allen said, "Let's give a welcome to Macaca, here. Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia." Apparently he didn't know that Macaca himself (real name S.R. Sidarth) was born and raised in Virginia…and apparently he forgot that he was born and raised in California.

Of course, there's a lot more. Did you know that the Senator wore a Confederate flag pin in his high school senior year photo and posed in front of one in HIS HOUSE for a 1993 campaign ad? How about the fact that he once opposed Martin Luther King Day, or hung a noose on a tree outside his law office? Of course, Allen claimed that he is a changed man…after all, he "recently passed an anti-lynching resolution".

Wow, he's really going out on a limb on that one, huh? Get it, "a limb"? Oh well, at least the Senator is laughing.

And finally, there's this bit of classic GOP posturing that backfired for the faux cowboy:

The Allen campaign said that [Democratic challenger Jim] Webb's position on flag burning exposed him as "liberal"… Those are fighting words in the Commonwealth, and Webb isn't taking them sitting down. Returning fire, Webb's camp said that "George Felix Allen Jr. and his bush-league lapdog, [campaign manager] Dick Wadhams, have not earned the right to challenge Jim Webb's position on free speech and flag burning." They noted that Webb, the secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan, served in Vietnam and "fought for our flag and what it stands for," while "George Felix Allen Jr. chose to cut and run."

Allen turned 18 in 1970, but he did not serve in Vietnam , staying in college and spending summers at what the Webb campaign calls a "dude ranch in Nevada."

Geez, calling this guy a douchebag doesn't seem to say enough, does it? Oh well, if the cowboy boot fits…