George Allen's political self-destruction sure makes strange bedfellows.
On Aug 25, 2006, the iconic Jewish Daily Forward published an article in which it implied that Allen was Jewish.
A week later, September 1, 2006, the weekly white power radio show GoyFire dedicated five minutes to a discussion of the Forward piece--concluding that George Allen was a "crypto-kike' or "the most dangerous kind of Jew."
Before his outburst at a debate question, Allen was already caught between a rock and a racist hard place by his Jewish heritage.
The Forward piece would make some Jewish voters suspicious of him as self-hating, while GoyFire piece would make some hard conservative voters spit on him as yet another Jew trying to take over the aryan world--a crypto-kike.
Heading into Monday's debate, Allen must have seen his whole political future crumbling down.
He was the man who had dipped chaw with both the neo-con and the neo-confederate radical right. Suddenly, he was tasting alot like dirty spinach to Jews and white supremacists alike.
The Forward
With all the smoke sent up by the 'macaca' incident, the real power of The Forward article on George Allen has yet to be fully explored.
The headline of that piece reads:
Alleged Slur Casts Spotlight On Senator's (Jewish?) Roots
This is classic "outing" rhetoric that for the first time frame the very visible public incident of a Senator's racism in terms of a more sinister, hidden story.
Obviously, The Forward was not trying to dig up Allen's Jewish heritage as a way of casting "aspersions" on the Senator for being Jewish. Readers of The Forward--neither a particularly progressive or radically conservative newspaper-- would have been proud to learn of a prominent politician who was Jewish.
The point of The Forward article was to raise the question of what Allen was hiding:
This might complicate life for Allen, a practicing Presbyterian who besides running for re-election this year in Virginia is often mentioned as a possible Republican 2008 contender. Political analyst John Mercurio of National Journal's noted tip sheet, The Hotline, said that any complication "would depend largely on how this information was revealed."
"If it was discovered that Allen knew this family history, but attempted to keep it under wraps for whatever reason, it could do great harm to any political campaign," Mercurio wrote in an e-mail. "He'd face serious questions, in the wake of the Macaca incident and his history with the Confederate flag, of whether he's both racially prejudiced and anti-semitic. Given the intensely pro-Israel sentiment that exists in this country today, that could be a huge political liability -- but on the other hand, if this is something he discovers and promptly reveals about himself, and does so with a sense of pride in his family history, I don't think he'd face much backlash at all."
Who would have guessed that The Forward of all papers would be so prophetic.
Indeed it has been Allen's attempt to keep the story of his Jewishness hidden that has caused the most harm--at least as much, if not more harm in the long run, than than the ongoing damage of the 'macaca' incident.
But more than that, The Forward article suggests that the real damage of the 'macaca' affair is not that it reveals George Allen as a racist--but that it reveals him as a suspicious or dishonest man who hides things about himself in such a way that it draws deep attention from all corners.
What kind of man hides information about his own family? Not an honest man and not a man I want as my Senator, let alone as my President.
Thus far, The Forward piece.
GoyFire
It should come as no surprise to anyone that one of the first media sources to really run with analysis of The Forward piece was white supremacist radio.
More than any other media outlet, one can imagine, a radio show with a mission of "Hammering out the jew, one broadcast at a time," will spend a considerable amount of time reading the Jewish press.
And so, the show posted September 1, the GoyFire gang discussed the meaning of the revelations from The Forward that George Allen had Jewish ancestry.
There is no transcript from the radio show, so to hear the spot one needs to sit through the opening minutes of the broadcast, but it is astounding to hear.
A full two weeks before the debate that turned Allen's angry response into a story, the GoyFire gange discussed all the details of Allen's Jewish heritage.
And why not? All the details of the story were already in The Forward piece.
Interestingly, GoyFire host Alex Linder concluded that the real damage in the revelations were that George Allen was a "crypto-kike"--a crass racist way of labelling Allen as a Jew who hid his identity so as to manipulate others.
Crypto-Judaism--despite the racist version of the term used on GoyFire--is in fact a well known phenomenon, discussed by respected scholars. But to the white supremacists it is not used to discuss the details of Allen's Jewish heritage, but to invoke the same frame of hidden details and suspicion as rasied by The Forward piece.
Indeed, the point of the surprisingly lucid discussion on GoyFire is not to simply throw a bunch of hate language at George Allen, but to raise in the mind of their listeners the same question raised by The Forward.
What kind of man hides information about his own family? Not an honest man and not a man I want as my Senator, let alone as my President.
GoyFire, in other words, re-enforced the frame of a suspicious and dishonest Allen that had been dribbling from the mouth of the 'macaca' story, albeit largely under the radar up to this point.
Peggy Fox
In this context, we begin to see a much broader picture of what was going on in Peggy Fox's question during the debate.
When to Peggy Fox's question, we need to fast forward all the way to the end to really hear what she was saying. After the booing from George Allen's mob, after Allen's anger about his mother.
After Allen lambsted Fox for even asking the question, he then asked her a question. Listen to Fox's answer:
ALLEN: So I would like to ask you, why is that relevant...?
FOX: Honesty.
Honesty? That's right. Amazingly, Fox's questions was not a question about Allen's Jewish heritage, was not a question about his racism, but was a question about his honesty in light of the revelations raised by The Forward article.
How is it that a news reporter sitting on the Virginia debate panel ends up inside the frame set by a Jewish newspaper two weeks before? That is a difficult question to answer.
But how Peggy Fox came to pose a question about honesty amidst all the accusations thate George Allen was a racist--that is the real story that historians will discuss long after George Allen loses his bid for re-election a little over a month from now.
Racist, fearful of his own heritage, crypto-Jew--all these debates that have raged about George Allen since he called a young man 'macaca' suggest that the question of his honesty run far deeper than the political divide in Virginia.
Republicans, Democrats, Independents, Jews, white supremacists, black, brown, and white alike--all seem to see that the big issue growing out of this year's Senate race is that George Allen is not honest--he hides things--he says something outrageous, then stumbles backwards into a thousand crazy explainations.
In Progressive circles, it is seems that George Allen has become a symbol of a rising neo-confederate movement in this country--a kind of "new and improved" version of the Republican Southern strategy that seeks to gain office by appealing to people's fear of racial and cultural difference.
But to voters in general--to all of Virginia and to all of America, George Allen has become a symbol far more loathsome and far more damaging to himself and to the Republcan party he seeks to lead.
He has become a symbol of a the politician who lies, a politician whose instincts lead him constantly away from telling the clear and simple truth about himself to the people whose very trust he seeks.
As Allen is so fond of claiming he carries the torch of Thomas Jefferson, he may be shocked to learn that on the subjeect of "honesty" Jefferson once remarked,"An honest man can feel no pleasure in the exercise of power over his fellow citizens."
The honest men and women of Virginia, apparently, are having more and more trouble feeling pleasure at the prospect of the very dishonest and suspicious George Allen holding office.