Huh. Who’da thunk it?

Democrat James Webb’s Senate campaign accused Sen. George Allen (R) of making demeaning comments Friday to a 20-year-old Webb volunteer of Indian descent.

S.R. Sidarth, a senior at the University of Virginia, had been trailing Allen with a video camera to document his travels and speeches for the Webb campaign. During a campaign speech Friday in Breaks, Virginia, near the Kentucky border, Allen singled out Sidarth and called him a word that sounded like “Macaca.”

“This fellow here over here with the yellow shirt, Macaca, or whatever his name is. He’s with my opponent. He’s following us around everywhere. And it’s just great. We’re going to places all over Virginia, and he’s having it on film and its great to have you here and you show it to your opponent because he’s never been there and probably will never come.”

After telling the crowd that Webb was raising money in California with a “bunch of Hollywood movie moguls,” Allen again referenced Sidarth, who was born and raised in Fairfax County.

“Lets give a welcome to Macaca, here. Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia,” said Allen, who then began talking about the “war on terror.”

(Macaca, in case you did not know, is an old and well worn racial slur) Well, everyone, actually, who had been paying attention. Several months ago, TNR did a piece on Allen that clearly marked the man as, at least, a racist sympathizer.

Campaigning for governor in 1993, he admitted to prominently displaying a Confederate flag in his living room. He said it was part of a flag collection–and had been removed at the start of his gubernatorial bid. When it was learned that he kept a noose hanging on a ficus tree in his law office, he said it was part of a Western memorabilia collection. These explanations may be sincere. But, as a chief executive, he also compiled a controversial record on race. In 1994, he said he would accept an honorary membership at a Richmond social club with a well-known history of discrimination–an invitation that the three previous governors had refused. After an outcry, Allen rejected the offer. He replaced the only black member of the University of Virginia (UVA) Board of Visitors with a white one. He issued a proclamation drafted by the Sons of Confederate Veterans declaring April Confederate History and Heritage Month. The text celebrated Dixie’s “four-year struggle for independence and sovereign rights.” There was no mention of slavery. After some of the early flaps, a headline in The Washington Post read, “governor seen leading va. back in time.”

… But he also found himself repeatedly voting in the minority on a series of racial issues that he seems embarrassed by today. In 1984, he was one of 27 House members to vote against a state holiday commemorating Martin Luther King Jr. The Richmond Times-Dispatch reported, “Allen said the state shouldn’t honor a non-Virginian with his own holiday.” He was also bothered by the fact that the proposed holiday would fall on the day set aside in Virginia to honor Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. That same year, he did feel the urge to honor one of Virginia’s own. He co-sponsored a resolution expressing “regret and sorrow upon the loss” of William Munford Tuck, a politician who opposed every piece of civil rights legislation while in Congress during the 1950s and 1960s and promised “massive resistance” to the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision banning segregation.

Now keeping mind that Allen is not a native of the South — meaning he came upon his love of Confederate symbolism and disdain for civil rights and civil rights’ leaders from California at a time when those symbols were being explicitly used to defend institutional racism. All of those incidents might be explainable, but taken together, the picture was clear. A non-Southerner adopts the symbols and history of the Confederacy, then litters his public career with actions that show, at a minimum, a vicious disdain for the struggle for equality in the middle of the 20th century. Well, clear to anyone who isn’t emotionally or politically invested in believing that the Southern Strategy isn’t about racism:

As it happens, I am also writing a profile on Senator Allen. In the middle of this yesterday, I read that the New Republic has a piece on Allen coming out. ABC News’s The Note carried excerpts hours before TNR published it on its website. TNR must have released it to them. So it thinks it has a pretty hot story on its hands.

The article is a hit piece. Lizza brings up the old stories about Allen hanging a Confederate flag in his Earlysville home and a noose in his law office. He dutifully reports that Allen, like many Virginians, opposed placing Martin Luther King Jr. Day on Lee-Jackson Day. He joined a “Richmond social club with a well-known history of discrimination” (sounds like Augusta National).

That was a pretty typical response on the right, when the piece wasn’t ignored outright: ignore the bigger picture, ignore Allen’s history, and focus on explaining away one or two portions of the piece with semi-plausible explanations. Except now the obvious has come out and Allen’s racism is so obvious as to make any attempt to minimize it ludicrous.

But the signs were all there. Ryan Lizza even connected them for all but the most willfully blind to see. And Yet Webb remained the GOP candidate for Senator of Virginia and remained on the short-list of GOP Presidential hopefuls. Neither of the facts speaks terribly well of the modern GOP. And neither of those facts are the creation of the big bad liberal media — the right inflicted Allen upon itself.