My favorite line from the new article:

Images of Allen are like a Civil War version of Where's Waldo

What would Waldo do?

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.

fter 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!'"

n 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!"

Don't make this as a flag issue. It loses most of its relevance when you define Allen's reprehensible history as solely based on a symbol, the confederate flag.

No, its much bigger than that. A better title is in order.

thanks.

Man, someone call Robert Byrd and Jay Rockefeller.  Apparently they don't represent a "real" state, in the eyes of a certain Virginia senator.  Also, give Joe Manchin a call, I'm sure he'd be surprised to learn that he only governs a "so-called" state.

I think that statement's even more damning than the rebel flag things, as far as showing what Allen thinks.

or "so-called Taiwan" or whatever.  Allen is either really stupid or really crazy.

I'm about halfway through Jennifer Allen's "Fifth Quarter," the book Sen. Allen's sister wrote about growing up in the family of the famed NFL coach.  I thought I would finish it faster, but Allen's sister, a freelance journalist, is a good writer and the book is an entertaining story of a dysfunctional household, as well as the hazards one encounters when growing up.

Yes, the parts about the Senator's sometimes violent behavior towards his siblings are in there.  I could make a case that his behavior was fairly typical of some of the jocks I have known -- perhaps more testosterone than they know how to deal with.  And, he did stand up to protect his younger brother when the coach attacked the latter and broke his nose.  But the violence seems over the top.  Some tales not mentioned in the Lizza article: "The last time we all watched a game together, George beat up Bruce, and Bruce beat up Gregory, and I bit my nails, and Mom screamed "Stop, stop, stop!" and held a knife above her head and threatened to kill herself if we didn't stop fighting."  (p. 77) 

The most telling part for me was the way coach Allen's  wife and daughter were treated by the males in the family. (Coach Allen always gave me the creeps when I would seem him on television -- now I can see my feelings were justified.)  As far as I can see, women were treated like property.  As Jennifer Allen states on p. 133 of the book: "My world had clearly defined functions: girls fold jockstraps, serve dinner, clear the table."  On page 98: "When Washington reporters asked about his family, Dad mentioned only his three sons . . .."  After a defeat, mother and daughter would wait for hours in the stadium, until dark, until the coach was ready to go home.  In Lizza's first article, Allen says of his sister's book: "We talk about his sister's book ("It's the perspective of the youngest child, who is a girl")."  Well, she was a grown woman when she wrote the book, with two children of her own.

I love me some Allen-bashing articles in tha morning..

How I'd appreciate a professional psychologist's analysis of these revelations, from the sister's book and from the Lizza articles. What a target-rich scene! Even an amateur can see this man has problems that go way beyond the normal adolescent growing-up problems. He sounds darned near psycho to me.

What is really so eerie and discomforting is how much he DOES resemble George W. Bush, his hero. Indeed, how often their basic Republican philosophy seems to be psycho: extremely authoritarian, patriarchal, jock-strap superiority and always bashing anyone in opposition, or perceived as opposition: Might makes Right, unable to cope with or even convceive of, another way for conflict resolution. Adolescent bullies, trapped in a time warp, going through the motions of presenting their macho face to the world (which is how their immature emotions perceive the part they want to play). 

It's tempting to analyse this to absurdity, but ye gods, this man must never be allowed to have his finger on the red button. This is not something you "outgrow," and the evidence is, he has not outgrown it, only learned to disguise it occasionally to fool people, while letting similar bullies know, wink, wink, they really are Tough.