NationStates Jolt Archive

Always nice to see "family" fights...pops some popcorn...gets another beer...

Accusations Fly in Virginia's Democratic Primary
Sunday, June 11, 2006

RICHMOND, Va. — One Democrat calls his rival the "anti-Christ of outsourcing" U.S. jobs and argues that he's trying to buy a win in the Virginia primary.

The other fires back, labeling his opponent a sexist who is hostile to affirmative action and is, at heart, a Republican.

Accusations fly freely in the Democratic primary between decorated Vietnam veteran and Reagan-era Navy secretary Jim Webb and former Internet industry lobbyist Harris Miller. The winner Tuesday will face first-term Sen. George Allen, a potential 2008 presidential candidate.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,198997,00.html

Reminds me a bit of Specter v. Toomey in Pennsylvania a couple of years ago--except that they were Republicans. This is what happens in primaries all the time.

You want to see some really bitchy behavior, look at Joe Lieberman in Connecticut. He's the whiniest thing around these days thanks to the pressure Ned Lamont is putting him under.

One Democrat calls his rival the "anti-Christ of outsourcing" U.S. jobs and argues that he's trying to buy a win in the Virginia primary.

That guy takes the prize for "most unusual metaphor" in my book..

Allen's up 20 points on either one of 'em, thankfully..

The democratic primary for govenor in California turned a little ugly, too. But I've seen primaries get that way. That bell was wrung a long time ago.

The democratic primary for govenor in California turned a little ugly, too. But I've seen primaries get that way. That bell was wrung a long time ago.

I think we perfected Ugly with the Arnold/Huffington/Bustamante debate... that was a new level of awkward..

Allen's up 20 points on either one of 'em, thankfully..For now--that'll tighten up. By the way, what do you think of Allen's Confederacy fetish? (http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20060515&s=lizza051506)

For now--that'll tighten up. By the way, what do you think of Allen's Confederacy fetish? (http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20060515&s=lizza051506)

What's wrong with being proud of his heritage?

More power to him, I have one on my car.

What's wrong with being proud of his heritage?

More power to him, I have one on my car.
Not suprising in the least...

For now--that'll tighten up. By the way, what do you think of Allen's Confederacy fetish? (http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20060515&s=lizza051506)

Hadn't heard of that, although I'm not from Virginia, so I don't know much about Sen. Allen personal quirks. However, I do drive through Virginia fairly regularly, and it seems like half the state is a Civil War memorial.. Lee's army was the Army of Northern Virginia, after all.. I wouldn't personally attach too much significance to a Virginia senator having a confederate flag on his shelf.

For now--that'll tighten up. By the way, what do you think of Allen's Confederacy fetish? (http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20060515&s=lizza051506)

Fuzzy, hard to make out, taped then transfered to another tape, red, blue, and white...don't show the picture...could be a Confererate flag, might be one...could be something else, might be...

I don't have a clue one way or the other.

Forget democratic cat fight, what about an Ann Coulter/Hillary Clinton cat fight?

What's wrong with being proud of his heritage?

More power to him, I have one on my car.
It's not his heritage (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Allen_(politician)). He's a fake southerner. He grew up in California, which means he embraced the Confederacy as an adult.

Not that that excuses your own obvious racism (obvious here and in other threads).

Forget democratic cat fight, what about an Ann Coulter/Hillary Clinton cat fight?

I love to see those two face off. That would be awsome. I'd even pay money to see that.

He grew up in California, which means he embraced the Confederacy as an adult.

If he embraced the Confederacy.

It's not his heritage (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Allen_(politician)). He's a fake southerner. He grew up in California, which means he embraced the Confederacy as an adult.

Not that that excuses your own obvious racism (obvious here and in other threads).

The whole civil war wasn't about Slavery, it was abouts states rights.

Of course I'm going to be branded a "racist". I don't agree with you on just about anything.

If he embraced the Confederacy.
Here's the whole thing. Sorry, there's no link, because I'm accessing it from the database I have access to through my university, but I'm posting the whole thing here. There's precious little "if" at question.

IT'S HARD TO make out, because the video is fuzzy. The copy I obtained was originally recorded off a television using VHS in 1993 and then transferred to a second tape, further degrading the quality. But, once you know what it is, it makes sense. It sits folded on a bookcase of trophies and bric-a-brac behind George Allen, who is seated at a desk in his home office. It's right there next to the fax machine. You can see the red field. You can make out the diagonal blue bar. And you can see what looks like a white star. It is the Confederate flag, and it appears in the very first ad that Allen broadcast in 1993, when he ran for governor.

"The ad ran in the beginning of his campaign, when we were introducing him," says Allen's 1993 media consultant, Greg Stevens, who made the spot. Stevens denies that the flag was purposefully added to the scene, which lasts for ten seconds of the 60-second commercial, to appeal to pro-Confederate voters. "To be honest, this spot helped him enormously, and it had nothing to do with the Confederate flag," Stevens says, adding that any criticism about "a Confederate flag supposedly put there to subtly suggest to people that he is a Confederate" is "horseshit, and you can quote me on that." Allen's communications director, press secretary, and deputy press secretary did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this article.

Images of Allen are like a Civil War version of Where's Waldo, with the Confederate flag replacing the bespectacled cartoon character. First, as The New Republic reported last week, there's the senior class photo from Palos Verdes High School with Allen wearing a Confederate flag pin ("Pin Prick," May 8). Now we learn that the Confederate flag appears as a decoration in Allen's first statewide ad, even though he has long maintained that the flag did not adorn his home after 1992.

Some conservatives have recently argued that the revelations about Allen's high school photo are irrelevant because the picture is so old. "[I]f we're going to scrutinize people's high school records as we vet them for public office, nobody gets to run," columnist Kathleen Parker wrote last week. But, as revealed by the 1993 campaign ad--as well as the accounts of Allen associates now stepping forward--his embrace of the Confederate flag is even more extensive than TNR previously reported. According to his colleagues, classmates, and published reports, Allen has either displayed the flag--on himself, his car, inside his home--or expressed his enthusiastic approval of the emblem from approximately 1967 to 2000.

AFTER HIS CONFEDERATE flag pin-wearing days in Palos Verdes, Allen attended the University of Virginia from 1971 to 1977. According to two law school classmates and one undergraduate classmate, Allen displayed the flag on his pickup truck while at UVA. "I can independently confirm," Allen law school classmate Don Cornwell writes in an e-mail, "as can hundreds of my classmates at the UVA Law School, that for the three years that George was there he drove an old pickup truck with notably newer Confederate flags on the bumpers. George and his truck was sort of a running joke in the law school."

According to a little-noticed 1993 Los Angeles Times article, Allen also displayed the flag in his room at UVA--a university where it was an explosive issue. According to the school newspaper, one of the hot debates on campus in 1971 was over students displaying the Confederate flag at football games, a spectacle that caused a near-race riot at one game, prompting the school to temporarily ban the flag from all athletic events. It would have been hard for Allen to miss this controversy: He was a quarterback on the football team.

Allen's fetish for Dixie did not wane after UVA. When he was a member of the House of Delegates from 1983 to 1991, Allen was known for his interest in the Confederacy. According to Clint Miller--a Republican who served with Allen in the Virginia House and later ran against him in the gubernatorial primary--while discussing a Civil War battle at a subcommittee meeting, Allen referred to Northerners as "Yankees." A woman agitated by the remark rose and retorted, "Young man, I'll have you know that those people that you referred to as the Yankees--that was the United States Army."

In the '80s, Allen lived in a cabin in Earlysville, Virginia, where he famously displayed the Confederate flag in his living room. Allen has long argued that the flag in his cabin was simply part of a collection. "I have flags from many countries, many states," Allen told me in a recent interview. "I have a Betsy Ross flag, the Virginia flag, the Mexican flag, the Portuguese flag, the Canadian flag, and the Confederate flag, and I just collect flags." Now that it is known that Allen displayed the Confederate flag on himself, his cars, and in his homes since the late '60s, the "flag collection" explanation, first peddled the year he ran for governor, seems hollow.

After all, according to his own campaign commercial, Allen seems not to have disavowed the flag so much as simply removed it from his wall and placed it on his bookshelf. And that's not the only evidence of his peculiar views of the Confederacy. In 1995, according to The Washington Post, Allen "referred to his neighboring state as `the counties that call themselves West Virginia,' evoking the old argument that their decision to secede and stay with the Union was illegal." In 1995, 1996, and 1997, Allen issued a proclamation drafted by the Sons of Confederate Veterans celebrating April as Confederate History and Heritage Month. The document made no mention of slavery. His successor, Republican Governor James Gilmore, repudiated Allen's proclamation and wrote a more balanced version that denounced slavery. Under educational guidelines proposed by Allen's administration, which were revised after an uproar, students would have been taught that slaves were "settlers." As recently as 2000, Allen still publicly expressed support for the Confederate flag. A Post reporter accompanying Allen at an event in Virginia captured this scene: "When one man at the Pork Festival said to Allen, 'Long live the Confederate flag!' he replied, 'You got it!'"

ON THE RIGHT, a debate is now brewing about what Allen's four-decade embrace of the Confederate flag means for his presidential ambitions. Some are bothered by the revelations. At the influential conservative website Redstate.com, the blogger TheCollegian, who volunteered for Allen in 1993, writes, "George Allen did not simply adopt an affection for the South, but the South at a certain time: a time when it was fighting to keep slavery legal. Even this would be ok if he had some family tie to the region at that time, but he doesn't. I find that to be disturbing."

But there's a second view. It is best expressed to me by Stevens, now a consultant to John McCain. He argues strenuously that I should not write a piece about Allen and the Confederate flag. He says it would be unfair to Allen. But, when I explain Allen's record on the issue, he makes another argument that has nothing to do with fairness, and I figure out why he is so forceful. "Well, you also realize you're getting him votes for the primary, right?" Stevens says, alluding to key states in the South. He raises his voice to a shout: "You're getting him votes! Big time!"

~~~~~~~~

By Ryan Lizza
Enjoy.

P.S. I hope you don't think I'm being flip about this, Celtlund. What happened on that other thread about Wallace is over, as far as I'm concerned.

Here's the whole thing. Sorry, there's no link, because I'm accessing it from the database I have access to through my university, but I'm posting the whole thing here. There's precious little "if" at question.


Enjoy.

P.S. I hope you don't think I'm being flip about this, Celtlund. What happened on that other thread about Wallace is over, as far as I'm concerned.

Yeah, sounds like he was something of an agitator in college, although that's nothing new.. In any case, there's nothing George Allen can do to affect the inevitable rise of Jeb. :D

The whole civil war wasn't about Slavery, it was abouts states rights.

Of course I'm going to be branded a "racist". I don't agree with you on just about anything.
If by that first statement, you mean that the Civil War was not exclusively about slavery, then I agree with you. If you're trying to say that slavery wasn't a factor, then I'm going to laugh you.

Neither of which has anything to do with the adoption of Confederate regalia for the modern racist movement--heritage or not, just as people have to get over the fact that the swastika will forever be linked to Naziism now regardless of its origins, people have to accept that racists have claimed the confederate battle flag as their own, and have suborned it for their own purposes. It is inextricably linked to racism now.

As for you, I haven't heard what you have to say on this subject, so I can't make a claim as to your position on racism. DM, however, is unquestionably a racist, as he has proven on other threads.

EDIT: Doh, I need to pay better attention to whom I'm responding.

If by that first statement, you mean that the Civil War was not exclusively about slavery, then I agree with you. If you're trying to say that slavery wasn't a factor, then I'm going to laugh you.

Neither of which has anything to do with the adoption of Confederate regalia for the modern racist movement--heritage or not, just as people have to get over the fact that the swastika will forever be linked to Naziism now regardless of its origins, people have to accept that racists have claimed the confederate battle flag as their own, and have suborned it for their own purposes. It is inextricably linked to racism now.

As for you, I haven't heard what you have to say on this subject, so I can't make a claim as to your position on racism. DM, however, is unquestionably a racist, as he has proven on other threads.

It wasn't exclusively about slavery, yes. There were other reasons. Most of the Racists/88ers nowadays have dumped the Confederate symbolism in lieu of more effective clothes to use. Nazism/ "White pride" is more effective as a tool to racists, and especially to young white people.

Reminds me a bit of Specter v. Toomey in Pennsylvania a couple of years ago--except that they were Republicans. This is what happens in primaries all the time.

You want to see some really bitchy behavior, look at Joe Lieberman in Connecticut. He's the whiniest thing around these days thanks to the pressure Ned Lamont is putting him under.
Lieberman may be a whiny bitchy baby, but Lamonts eyes just creep me out.

Lieberman may be a whiny bitchy baby, but Lamonts eyes just creep me out.
He can have daggers coming out of them for all I care. All I know is that he's said he'll support the winner of the primary, while Lieberman hasn't ruled out an independent run if he loses to Lamont. It's all about Joe.

For now--that'll tighten up. By the way, what do you think of Allen's Confederacy fetish? (http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20060515&s=lizza051506)
It's not the confederate flag, it's the confederate BATTLE flag, which arguably stands for a different set of values altogether. Whether or not you agree with the souths views on the nature of beauacracy and the 'natural' order of things, the battle flag itself stands first and formost for the courage of those who fought and died under it, as well as the honor of notables like Robert E. Lee.