So, two more people have come forward to contradict Allen’s blanket claims about having never used the n word and that anyone who says so is a liar, including a third who doesn’t want to be identified because a relative works for the Bush administration. We’re now up to around 12 named accusers on this score, along with any number of other ones who have thus far stayed anonymous.
They claim, as many other witnesses, that Allen used the word frequently, and specifically recall his habit of reffering to any black suit cards he didn’t want as “n word” cards.
Allen’s people refuse to even ask Allen if these allegations are true: after claiming that Allen has never done anything like that, calling all the accusers liars (which had the effect of just bringing out even more of them angry that allen would lie), and spending millions for two minutes of Tv time to call the accusations “baseless” they’ve decided to wash their hands of the issue. Unfortunately, I don’t think that is going to work.
Just to give you a sense of the sort of spin Allen engages in, here’s a little story from his high school years (again the story is less about what he did then but what he says about it now). Basically, there was a big sports rivalry between Allen’s high school and a predominantly African American school. Several people from those days have come forward with claimed incidents establishing some pretty nasty behavior on Allen’s part (including labeling a baseball bat he kept in his vehicle “The N***er Knocker”) but the only one we know for sure is that:
- Allen started claiming that the rival school was going to try something.
- The next day someone spraypainted Allen’s school, including all sorts of (anti-white) racial epithets.
Allen was suspended, making it hard to deny that any of the above facts, recalled by others, were baseless.
But Allen’s spin today: yes he spraypainted the school, but he doesn’t know how any racially offensive terms got there (if he has to mention them at all).
George Allen is an idiot. If he had simply at some point in his career acknowledged that he was once a racist, but that he has changed and sincerely regrets his past and wants to make amends, I have every reason to think that voters would believe him. Allen has a heck of a lot to recommend him in terms of doing things that African American voters care about.
But what he’s doing now is just boneheaded, and there’s no reason to think that he can proceed as a politician via simply lying about it and hoping no one cares. This issue never would have come up if, as Gibson notes, Allen hadn’t said “NEVER” when asked. He created the problem for himself, and compounded it by handling it in the worst way possible.
