Apologies if this has been diaried or posted already, but I didn't find it in a search.
Taegan Goddard's Political Wire has a preview of Ryan Lizza's upcoming New Republic profile on Virginia Senator George Allen.
Apparently young George had quite an affinity for the Confederate Flag -- which would be regrettable but perhaps not terribly shocking if Allen had grown up in the South instead of in California.
Here's Goddard quoting Lizza:
Political Wire received an advance copy of a New Republic profile of Sen. George Allen (R-VA) in which author Ryan Lizza finds many of Allen's high school classmates surprised that he's considering running for president because of the racist tendencies he displayed as a teenager. They say he "plastered the school with confederate flags" and drove a red Mustang with a confederate flag on the front. Then Lizza got a copy of Allen's high school yearbook:
"I stared closely at Allen's smirk in his photo, weighing whether his old classmates were just out to destroy him. And then I noticed something on his collar. It's hard to make out, but then it becomes obvious. Seventeen-year-old George Allen is wearing a Confederate flag pin."
When confronted with this evidence, Allen sent an email through an aide with this explanation: "When I was in high school in California, I generally bucked authority and the rebel flag was just a way to express that attitude."
DavidNYC at Swing State Project notes just how idiotic this is -- as if it's not already idiotic and embarrassing enough for a U.S. Senator to have this in his background:
Wow. Just wow. And Allen can't even offer the meager excuse that he was "embracing his heritage" or anything like that - he grew up in California, his dad is from Detroit, and his mother is from Tunisia.