reality-based educator

Salon published a story today that alleged Virginia Senator George Allen regularly used the 'n' word to refer to black people back in the 70's. The allegations were made by three former football teammates of Allen. Allen's campaign denied the charge and pulled some other former teammates out of the woodwork to back up the senator.

But Larry Sabato, a professor at the University of Virginia and one of the premier political scientists in the country (you'll often see him quoted in AP and Reuters articles on politics) told Chris Matthews on Hardball tonight that he knows for a fact that Allen has used the 'n' word in the past. Sabato wouldn't tell Matthews how he knows Allen has used the 'n' word, but from what I gathered watching the tape, either Sabato himself heard Allen use the 'n' word or has heard from another unimpeachable source that Allen has used it.

In addition, The New York Times has another source who also claims to have heard Allen use the 'n' word to refer to blacks:

Christopher Taylor, an anthropology professor at Alabama University in Birmingham, Ala., said that in the early 1980’s he heard Mr. Allen use an inflammatory epithet for African Americans. Mr. Taylor, who is white and was then a graduate student at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, said the term came up in a conversation about the turtles in a pond near Mr. Allen’s property. According to Mr. Taylor, Mr. Allen said that “around here” only the African Americans — whom he referred to by the epithet — “eat ‘em.”

...

Mr. Taylor, the Alabama professor, said he was “kind of taken aback” by Mr. Allen’s language because it was their first meeting and Mr. Allen knew he was talking to a graduate student in anthropology. “Most of us are antiracist,” Mr. Taylor said.

Still, Mr. Taylor said, he did not give Mr. Allen “a moral lesson.” Mr. Taylor said he had come to pick up an Australian shepherd puppy and left with the dog.

The Associated Press covers the Allen campaign's denial of the initial allegations made by three of Allen's former teammates, including Dr. Ken Shelton, a North Carolina radiologist who is white, and picks up one of the more disturbing allegations Shelton made against Allen:

During a deer hunt with Allen in the early 1970s, Shelton said, Allen asked whether black families lived in the area before stuffing a female deer’s head into the mail box of a black household.

“George insisted on taking the severed head, and I was a little shocked by that,” Shelton said.

“This was just after the movie “The Godfather” came out with the severed horse’s head in the bed,” Shelton told the AP.

Given the racist epithet he tossed at an Indian man working for his opponent's campaign, the bizarre response he had to being asked if he had any Jewish ancestry, and the charges made by his sister that Allen reguarly abused members of the Allen family including breaking his one brother's collarbone and throwing his other brother through a sliding glass door for not going up to bed on time, along with his affinity for flying the Confederate flag and his alleged use of the 'n' word in the past (with five people now claiming they have heard Allen use it), I think we can officially say Senator Allen is, to paraphrase Lynne Cheney, "a very bad man."

If there's any justice in the universe, this very bad man will lose the election and be forced to crawl off into political oblivion with the knowledge that his own racism ended his political career.

But I'm not holding my breath.