• He once tried to frame visiting black students for graffiti he had spray-painted on his own high school reading "Die Whitey."
• He wore a Conferate flag lapel pin in his high school Senoir year picture, despite the fact that he grew up in Southern California.
• He has recently been described by several unrelated and not-anonymous people as having used the word "nigger" to describe black people in the 1970's.
• He was recently accused by one not-anonymous person of once stuffing a severed deer's head into the mailbox of a black household.
• As a member of the Virginia legislature in the 1980's, he voted against a state holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr.
• As governor of Virginia in the mid-1990's, he proclaimed April Confederate History and Heritage Month, calling the US Civil War a struggle over sovereign rights -- which is code language for the denial of the role of slavery in that national coflict.
• Also in the mid-'90's, he initiated a relationship with the openly racist Council of Conservative Citizens organization.
• And last month, he twice referred to an Indian-American man as "macaca," a word commonly understood by those familiar with it to be a slur against dark-skinned people. During one of his several long-delayed apologies for this act, he winked at his all-white audience, who responded with knowing laughter.
• As a bonus measure, he reacted with barely-contained fury last week when asked by a reporter whether his mother is Jewish, which she is.

There are a couple things we need to know immediately as a result of all of this nonsense:

1. Why is all of this coming out just now? It's only because of the "macaca" flap that we are hearing about some of the more disturbing aspects of Senator Allen's behavior. Why did people remain silent all these years while he was allowed to work his way through the Virginia state government and into the United States Senate?
2. Why did so many savvy political observers consider a racist jerk like Allen to be leading contender for the presidency of the United States?

Can't say for sure what the answer to this first question is, but we do have thoughts on the second.

First of all, Allen has remade himself in the image of an "authnetic" Southerner. And in American presidential politics, being from the South is the ultimate trump card. Unfortunately.

For reasons that people more schooled in American anthropology than we are can better explain, the South continues to cling to the cultural tribalism that led to its disasterous attempt to secede from the United States a century-and-a-half ago. These tribal sensibilities were triggered with explosive force when Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat, signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act acknowledging the humanity and protecting the basic rights of the nation's black citizens.

From that moment forward, and to this day, no one has ever been elected US president without being either Republican or from the South. As with George W. Bush, anyone claiming both of those heritages gets an automatic first-round bye past the credibility stage.

How is it that one region of the United States can so completely seize control of the presidential selection process? We have our old friend the Electoral College to thank for that. The College distorts the will of America's voters by forcing them into intra-state battles in which the winning candidate within each state takes all of that state's support.

Most (no, of course not all, but most) Southern white voters, still stinging from their twin loses of the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries, reliably vote only for presidential candidates they feel will not use the powers of the government to make special efforts to address the secondary status of blacks in America: Republicans, and fellow Southerners.

Readers who think we are being unfair or are overgeneralizing need to come up with an alternative plausible explanation for why the only presidential nominee to win even one Southern state since 1964 without being Southern or Republican was Hubert Humphrey, who was the incumbent Vice President under president Johnson, a Southerner from Texas. The only Southern state Humphrey won: Texas.

It is that fact -- that only members of the nation's of, by, and for whites party or of the Southern tribe can win the most votes in any Southern state -- that represents the most damning evidence of the regressive quality of the Electoral College. If the US had a straight popular vote, or at least something more proportional, for choosing its president, voters with their hearts and minds in the 19th and 20th century would not be able to hold the entire region hostage this way.

Savvy political observers know this, and are therefore able to assume that a pot-holed past like Allen's -- which was not entrely unknown before he entered the Senate -- can be safely overlooked as they begin to pick their early-round favorites.

Allen, by the way, has tried to cover for his racist track record in recent years through activities such as generating more funds for historically black colleges and universities and sponsoring a resolution apologizing for the Senate's failure to pass anti-lynching legislation in 20th century.

Lipstick on a pig.

Many black colleges are having a hard time with their finances, so every dollar helps. But if Allen is really concerned about the educational opportunities for blacks, how about sponsoring legislation to increase federal funding to urban public primary and secondary schools, where the overwhelming majority of African Americans receive the totality of their formal education?

And that lynching apology? As we pointed out at the time, as a gesture it's emptier than George Bush's cranium.

As perhaps a final Hail-Mary play following the "macaca" incident, Allen recently invited reporters to a slapdash "Ethnic Rally" of non-white voters allegedly supporting his re-election campaign. That this event was just as pathetic as it sounds should, at this point, go without saying.

In short, Senator Allen has impressed us that he is little more than a racist cretin trying to play dress-up for his big moment on stage. And for his performance this year, he should be a shoo-in for the '06 Strommy.

In fact, at this rate he'll undoubtedly some day be a recipient of the Bull Connor Lifetime Achievement Award.