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So I’m lis­ten­ing to an older clip from CNN, and I have to say this. To ask George Allen whether he is Jewish or not is a scum­bag ques­tion. The “he’s just a celebrity” excuse is lam­en­ta­bly lame, and I for one got the impres­sion that Arianna Huffington would just as soon the per­son who said it stop help­ing her. However, Ms. Huffington’s defense of the ques­tion as a “test of honesty” — while pass­ing a basic credulity test — does not quite stand up to the exam­ple given by David Frum, that of Clinton’s infi­delity. To my mind, at least, lying about cheat­ing on your wife is at best a few hairs­breadths away from lying about your Semitic her­itage in Virginia, not coin­ci­den­tally because both are done to save your polit­i­cal ass from igno­rant bigots.

Which is the real point about this story: can­di­dates from both par­ties are actively court­ing what amounts to the KKK vote: George Allen calls an Asian-Indian kid a mon­key like it was noth­ing; a reporter outs Allen as a Jew.

It’s the most vile, dis­gust­ing debase­ment of pol­i­tics that I’ve seen in my adult life, and there is no excuse for it. It’s 2006, gen­tle­men, scarcely con­cealed racist crap as an elec­toral strat­egy is like, sooo 1988. As a good friend of mine used to say when con­fronted with that kind of shock­ing, throw­back racism: They still make peo­ple like you?

Apparently so, and they’re still thick as theives in Virginia.

To add a rather quaint, pre-Internets layer to the story, party hacks up here (i.e. the North) are mak­ing hay by paint­ing the other team’s player as a bigot — an obvi­ous embar­rass­ment to their party. So far the Democrats have had bet­ter luck at this than the Republicans, in part because Webb appears to be smart enough to know what “plau­si­ble deni­a­bil­ity” means — have peo­ple not linked to you actu­ally do the dirty work — whereas Allen’s big­otry tends to come out of his own dum­b­assed mouth.