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Long time Shirley Ellis fan George Allen likes to give people nicknames, so we thought we’d give him a nickname of his own. Whichever one gets the most votes will be the name we’ll use when referring to Allen at least for the next week or so. We do, however, reserve the right to continue using the “Mysterious Macaca” graphic.
So what do we know about George Allen?
From Fifth Quarter, his sister’s memoir, regarding the young George’s hatred for a neighborhood Packers fan and his mailbox:
[The mailbox often] lay smashed in the street, a casualty of my brothers’ drive-by to school in the morning. George would swerve his Mach II Mustang while Gregory held a baseball bat out the window to clear the mailbox off its post. . . . Lately, the Packers fan had resorted to stapling a Kleenex box to the mailbox post to receive his mail. George’s red Mustang screeched up beside us, the Packers fan’s Kleenex mailbox speared on the antenna.
So, okay, George Allen doesn’t deal with ethnic types very well. Turns out he’s not very good at effective damage control, either. Allen’s peddling a new and, er, crappier explanation of what “macaca” really meant:
According to two Republicans who heard the word used, “macaca” was a mash-up of “Mohawk,” referring to Sidarth’s distinctive hair, and “caca,” Spanish slang for excrement, or “shit.”
Said one Republican close to the campaign: “In other words, he was a shit-head, an annoyance.” Allen, according to Republicans, heard members of his traveling entourage and Virginia Republicans use the phrase and picked it up.
So imagine how thrilled we were this morning to open our inbox and find an angry email from our buddy Alan Colmes, who, while Googling his own name, came across yesterday’s item about him and macaca:
You misquoted me. I did NOT say that “Macaca” means “Mohawk”. I said the opposite. And my comment that “he’s from Virginia, from Fairfax County” was to point out that Allen was being smarmy my saying “Welcome to America.” Who wrote this post? And why did you take me out of context?
Our response after the jump.
Now, finally, the George Allen “Whoops I accidentally made up an ethnic slur” memorial t-shirts appear. We appreciate the effort, but surely someone can whip up something better than this. MORE »
What would we do without Alan Colmes’ evenhandedness?
Thank God for Alan “Cool Hand” Colmes, who just saved us from further embarassment by settling the “macaca” debate last night on Hannity & Colmes:
We’re still trying to decide what Sen. George Allen meant when he called University of Virginia student S.R. Sidarth “Macaca” during a recent stump speech. Maybe he meant to say “macaw,” a bird with gaily-colored plumage? Or “Macarena,” the ’90s dance craze popularized by the band Los Del Rio?
Or did he mean to say that Sidarth was farkakte, a Yiddish word that loosely translates as “shitty”? Yeah, I’d think it was shitty too if I were running for Senate and my asshole opponent sent someone around to videotape every casual slur I made. Our readers were all over this last night and this morning. Read what they came up with after the jump:
