If we want an honestly African American Justice, then we need to another black man (WOMAN!) on the bench. Because Thomas brings as much credibility and purpose to the Court as The Hoff does to America’s Got Talent.

Does this harm people? Yes. And the more power this simpleton is given the more harm. But he is not a hardened racist. I think he has hardened-racist envy and finds it easy to use a few symbols to get his populist message across. I assure you that George Allen has nothing to do with the folks in the hinterland who may be the traditional racists except at election time. Like Shrub, he has contempt for the weak. Unlike Shrub, he expresses his sin by taking on a caricature of Southern Culture.

I think George Felix Allen’s racism is the real deal. He is a faux Southerner, but he was into the whole confederate-flag-as-a-racist-symbol thing when he was in high school, and he displayed a hangman’s noose as signal of his pro-lynching cred.

Both George Walker Bush and George Felix Allen are haters — but GWB hates everything not of his class, while GFA hates everyone not of his race.

Powell, Rice, Gonzales, etc. He acts as though he is the proud patriarch of all of these carefully contrived appointments, but I can’t shake the feeling that he is snickering in his sleeve while his lip trembles and fake tears comes to his eyes as he touts their incredible rise from impossible circumstances.

Smells Rovian.

The Democratic Progressives rejected racism, while the Rebublican Conservatives embraced racism — to the everlasting shame of those who believe in Abraham Lincoln. Trent Lott had been a Dixiecrat racist, and he joined the exodus to the GOP with his fellow racists.

And that — is the historic context of this debate.

It’s right out of the Lee Atwater playbook (George Allen’s “macaca” comment), at whose knee Mary Matalin, Allen’s biggest supporter, studied. Bob Herbert reported in the October 6, 2005 edition of the New York Times of a 1981 interview with Lee Atwater in which he explains the GOP’s Southern Strategy:

You start out in 1954 by saying, ”Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say ”nigger” – that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me – because obviously sitting around saying, ”We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ”Nigger, nigger.”

I don’t think that Allen is as stoopid as dubya, but his racism is not so deftly hidden as w.’s perhaps cause he doesn’t have Rove (yet). They do both have a penchant for drink and power. They are both sons of privilege.

They are both pretend cowboys. They both seem to have a tendency to call people by nicknames instead of their given names. They are both authoritarian yet have problems with authority figures themselves. The similarities are seemingly endless…

Mmmmm . . . not quite. George Bush is not a racist, but a classist — his purpose in life is to grease the rich and powerful, while sticking it to everyone else. GWB is a sadistic con artist — there is nothing he loves more than play acting the good buddy backslapper, while he’s really getting away with a back stab. He is the classic model of a fraternity fascist.

George Felix Allen Junior — he is a racist, through and through. His slur reveals that he learned it at his mother’s knee, which means it is impossible to unlearn — just as GWB can never unlearn the viciousness his mother taught him.

George Felix Allen is a Neo-Klansman, and a hard core rascist through and through — the Kiss Float for him might need to go the pointy hat and white sheet route.

In the field I work in, a factor of 8760 is considered an overwhelming difference, not “rewriting history”.