posted
The Senate race in Virginia got a lot more exciting when incumbent Allen started insulting student reporters. Almost overnight, after calling a reporter a macac, his standings in the polls plummeted, and Democratic underdog Jim Webb's polls shot up.
Both men have been accused of racism in their early lives; Webb has been accused of misogyny for writing a paper entitled 'Women Can't Fight.' (Webb reorganized the USMC)
Both men's stance on immigration bothers me. I agree more with Webb on the Iraq war, and I think he knows more about military operations than Allen (not sure how much that will really help him make good decisions in the Senate, though).
It's an interesting race, watching Allen scramble for votes so late in the game. The race was practically his; now the liberal voters in Northern VA are motivated, and the rural voters are disenchanted with the GOP.
The thing is, Webb's not really your classic Democrat, as far I can see. He critisized John Kerry pretty savagely back in 2004, and all the books he's written have been military.
Wonder how this is going to shake down.
Posts: 14554 | Registered: Dec 1999
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posted
This is the race I registered to vote for. This is the race that I'm excited to vote for.
I don't know who I'm going to vote for.
This is because I'm currently lazy. I intend to do some research on voting records and policy issues later. I wonder if I'm failing on my part to vote in good people because I care more about how they do their job than their personalities. I'm basing this on the assumption that I wouldn't really want to be friends with either.
Posts: 26077 | Registered: Mar 2000
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posted
(My wife's family detests George Allen. A large part of my animosity towards him comes from their experiences)
Posts: 14554 | Registered: Dec 1999
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posted
I can't believe that George Allen would have called that Indian guy that name if he knew it was a racist term. He must have known that everyone would find out anything he said in a public speech.
You can find George Allen's making his gaffe on YouTube pretty easily. It's so funny to watch someone destroy themselves like that.
Posts: 781 | Registered: Apr 2005
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posted
This question just became academic for me, because I last night found on my desk the voter registration form I filled out and forgot to mail in June. So I can either drive down to Charlottesville (not going to happen) or not vote.
posted
There's some fudging on both sides here. Allen's "macaca" comment, it can be argued, wasn't racist because before the whole controversy started, nobody even considered "macaca" a real word, much less a pejorative. The later revelations of a lifetime of racist attitudes are more damning, I think.
Meanwhile, Webb explicitly stated that he didn't think women should be in the military. On the other hand, this was something like 30 years ago, when such beliefs were hardly uncommon, and he later went on to open up a great deal of new opportunities for women as secretary of the Navy.
Unfortunately, I think Webb is pretty much doomed, for one simple reason: in many districts, including those most likely to vote Democratic, they changed the font size on the ballots so that his name no longer fits. Instead, it reads "JAMES H. 'JIM'."
Posts: 1321 | Registered: Sep 1999
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posted
Um. I knew the word as a type of monkey before the whole controversy, and would have assumed if someone used it to refer to a human that they were trying to be offensive. So I don't think it can be argued very well that the comment wasn't racist.
Posts: 7954 | Registered: Mar 2004
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quote:Originally posted by Dagonee: This question just became academic for me, because I last night found on my desk the voter registration form I filled out and forgot to mail in June. So I can either drive down to Charlottesville (not going to happen) or not vote.
Bad, irresponsible Dagonee!
Apparently your state does not allow absentee voting just for the heck of it, as mine does?
(Yes, I moved over a year ago. And I was SURE I had re-registered. But apparently not.)
Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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quote:Unfortunately, I think Webb is pretty much doomed, for one simple reason: in many districts, including those most likely to vote Democratic, they changed the font size on the ballots so that his name no longer fits. Instead, it reads "JAMES H. 'JIM'."
Hmm. I'd heard that that mistake was only on the summary portion of the ballot. The actual ballot part reads fine.
Do you have a link to your information?
Posts: 14554 | Registered: Dec 1999
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quote:Originally posted by ElJay: Um. I knew the word as a type of monkey before the whole controversy, and would have assumed if someone used it to refer to a human that they were trying to be offensive. So I don't think it can be argued very well that the comment wasn't racist.
Really? My bad... I'd never heard it before, and didn't know anyone else who had. I have to admit that I haven't been following Allen too closely, since I'm neither Virginian nor Republican. Posts: 1321 | Registered: Sep 1999
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quote:Unfortunately, I think Webb is pretty much doomed, for one simple reason: in many districts, including those most likely to vote Democratic, they changed the font size on the ballots so that his name no longer fits. Instead, it reads "JAMES H. 'JIM'."
Hmm. I'd heard that that mistake was only on the summary portion of the ballot. The actual ballot part reads fine.
posted
Dagonee -- same thing happened with me, I forgot to change my registration when I moved from Charlottesville to nearby... anyway, I was in the city Wednesday and so I stopped by the City Hall Annex and voted absentee. I think I remember seeing a sign saying that Nov. 4 was the cutoff date for absentee voting.
*Caresses his "I made democracy count!" voting sticker*
Posts: 2911 | Registered: Aug 2001
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quote:Originally posted by plaid: I think I remember seeing a sign saying that Nov. 4 was the cutoff date for absentee voting.
Huh? I know not every state has does absentee ballots the way California does, but that's weird.
Here, you request yours by mail (or now online), and they mail it to the address on file. (Which I guess wouldn't work for Dags regardless. But since my old address is my parents' current address, it works for me.) You complete it and mail it back (postmarked no later than voting day) OR drop it off at any polling place (or have someone else do so) on voting day.
We also have touchscreen voting in certain locations starting this week and running through a few days before voting day.
Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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quote:Originally posted by plaid: I think the Nov. 4 deadline sign was for stopping-by-to-vote absentee.
Yes, got that. Stopping by WHERE? Here, except for the (quite recent) addition of touchscreen voting, there is nowhere to vote except on voting day itself.
Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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posted
My point, however, is that it is also the genus name for a type of monkey, so for me to say I knew the word as a type of monkey and then Omega M to "correct" me without the even the most basic web search to find out if it might in fact actually BE a type of monkey, as well as a slur, is basically saying I don't know what I'm talking about. Which is sometimes the case. But not, as it happens, this time.
Added: Here are the particular Macaca fuscatas I'm familiar with. Posts: 7954 | Registered: Mar 2004
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posted
Mr. Allen has a schtick he does about "real Virginia," basically everything except Northern Virginia. He often extends that to "real America." It's an anti-Beltway kind of appeal, associating the northern part of the state with DC. It's been very successful and plays extremely well in the crowd he was speaking to. I've seen him do it, in person, since he ran for governor over a decade ago. It's common amongst other politicians from both parties when facing opponents with northern Virginia bases. (There's a famous flubb made by Bush I trying to do the same thing by saying his opponent didn't get farther south than South Boston. Bush was about 15 miles from a Virginia town called South Boston.)
I am absolutely convinced that he would have said the exact same thing, minus Macaca, if the video operator were white - I've heard him use the other party's monitor in that way before.
Adding "Macaca" was stupid, no other word for it. I suspect it was a feeble attempt to conjure up a foreign sounding name. But he wasn't playing up to racism or xenophobia (at least international xenophobia) so much as playing a time-honored regionalist game in Virginia politics.
Now, I have huge problems with this little schtick and the state regionalism (as well as the reverse regionalism that emanates from No.Va.), but it's necessary to understand this context to fully judge what he was saying.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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posted
Err...now I'm not a Virginian, but my understanding was that George Allen was known to have had a very racist past - he had a noose in his office as a D.A., draped the Confederate Flag over thigns, had close associations with an offshoot of the K.K.K., etc. The Macaca thing was initially weird, and then it turned out to be a French/Algerian racist comment. Since his mother lived for some time in Alegria (I think this is right, but I just got a version of this one night, didn't pay that much attention to it), it seems very likely he got it from her.
But, as far as I know, this didn't hurt him that greatly in the polls. His lead dropped, but he was still strongly favored to win. The thing that really hurt his campaign was that people found out that his mother was Jewish and he had been telling people she wasn't. It was after that that his numbers started really slipping.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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posted
George Allen was accused of having a racist past, accusations that dated back to his run for governor. There is a member of his college football team who has publicly made accusations (the Post printed anonymous accusations as well, which I thought pretty cheesy), but many other members of that team - including black members - have directly contradicted claims that they would have been witnesses to.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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quote:the thing that really hurt his campaign was that people found out that his mother was Jewish and he had been telling people she wasn't. It was after that that his numbers started really slipping.
posted
My take is that Allen is incredibly insensitive to the potential racist import of his acts, inexcusably so for a politician, but not racist.
The noose in the D.A.'s office was quite possibly related to a "hard on crime" kind of image:
quote:Grandpappy told my pappy Back in my day, son A man had to answer For the wicked thing he done Take all the rope in Texas Find a tall oak tree Round up all of them bad boys And hang 'em high in the street For all the people to see
I've seen pictures of electric chairs in prosecutors' offices as well as a picture of an old-west gallows. Never a noose, though.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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posted
WillB, you need to put a warning on your post about the depictions in the link, please.
As far as the passages referred to being damaging... well, they're all obviously taken out of context. In order to claim that these scraps of narrative show that Webb is categorically misogynistic, we'd need more than scraps.
We need the full context of the book.
Posts: 14554 | Registered: Dec 1999
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posted
Really? I kinda like the Drudge Report. It's kind of like reading the tabloids while waiting in line at the grocery store.
Posts: 880 | Registered: Nov 2005
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posted
I guess I'm kind of torn on the issue. Should the man be held accountable for the fiction that he writes? Does the views of characters in a book reflect on the views of the author?
Posts: 880 | Registered: Nov 2005
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posted
I think you may be jumping the gun just a little bit there smitty. It's a Druge Report release from a Republican campaign. To put it another way, we have no reason to believe that it is even actually true, let alone a fair representation of what was written.
I looked up Senator Allen on wikipedia to see what allegations there were.
Scott, I don't see anywhere on your link that it was the macaca thing that hurt him and that people don't care about the denying his mother was Jewish thing. As I said, as far as I know, his polls took a bigger hit after the Jewish thing than the macaca incident. He still had a lead until the Jewish thing came out. It is possible that it was just a delayed reaction that happened to coincide with the Jewish revelation though.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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quote:does the views of characters in a book reflect on the views of the author?
:flatly:
No, they don't.
Disagree. I think the answer would be flatly "Maybe" or "I don't know". You can't say that an author's personality doesn't come through his characters or his plot lines.
That being said, you can't say that they do. And this form of attack is certainly low and/or desperate.
Posts: 880 | Registered: Nov 2005
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There's not a refutation about the poll numbers in the article I linked. I linked the article to show that Allen only found out recently that he was Jewish, and that he had promised his mother he wouldn't say anything.
Your post may be construed by some people to indicate that he had known for a long time, and was hiding it for political reasons.
Allen STILL has a lead in the polls. Not by much; with the statistical margin of error, he and Webb are in a dead heat.
Like I said-- the macaca thing has been on the news much more frequently than the Jewish thing. Allen was on the news yesterday afternoon in an interview where they questioned him about racism, his stance on immigration-- never mentioned a word about his Jewishness. (This was on 94.3, the new ESPN station here in NoVA. Yeah, politics on ESPN. I thought it was a Christian station until they started asking Allen for his picks)
I'm telling you, it's just not on people's minds.
Posts: 14554 | Registered: Dec 1999
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posted
The disclosure about his mother preceded the Washington Post article on with very specific allegations - including one about a deer's head in a mailbox - by only 6 days.
There's one tie in a poll taken over a 5 day period, 4 days of which were after the Post's article.
The racist article was a MUCH bigger deal than both macaca and the disclosure about his mother, at least in No. Va.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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posted
I think every thought that a writer puts into words reflect their innermost personal goals and needs.
That's why OSC is secretly trying to be the Hegemon, if he doesn't destroy the Earth first as an agent of a bug-like collective minded alien race.
Posts: 11895 | Registered: Apr 2002
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You're probably right; it's a subject that's been on my mind lately. (Along the lines of, "Am I a bad person if I have my characters do bad things?")
I don't think characters necessarily reflect an author's viewpoints; OSC'd have to be athiest (as was Bean) if that were true.
Posts: 14554 | Registered: Dec 1999
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posted
I'm getting my info from a friend of mine who lives in Richmond, Va. He's not terribly political and we were talking about the weird things about this year's races (The GOP is running some guy for Congress in my district whose only qualifications appear to be he was on The Apprentice, but considering that their candidate for governor's strongest point is that he used to be really good at football, maybe that's their new strategy.) and we got to talking about this. I haven't been following it so much, so there you go.
---
edit: One thing though Scott. Your link only showed that he and his mother claimed that he didn't know. I didn't see any independent confirmation of this, just their say so.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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posted
Squick, there's potentially a huge difference in how each issue is treated in different regions, so it's very possible everyone is right about which issue is dominating a long as the locale is taken into account. Scott and I are in an area wit a population that has a high-percentage of people from outside the state originally. We have mostly Washington-centric media.
Richmond has southern and southwestern Virginia media, with a very different mix of personal histories than Northern Virginia.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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