He's running for president. He's a mainstream Republican. And he's a racist.

That would be one George Allen of Virginia of course. (Cue troll comment about Robert Byrd, who is not running for president, in 3...2...1...)

The evidence accumulating against him:

1 - He publicly mocked S.R. Sidarth, a young Indian-American staff member for his Democratic opponent, as a"macaca." And though Allen says, he made a mistake, his apologies are lame. He looked directly at that young man and insulted him twice. This was in your face stuff and not just an unfortunate incident.

2 - In 1984, he was one of 27 House members to vote against a state holiday commemorating Martin Luther King Jr. The Richmond Times-Dispatch reported, "Allen said the state shouldn't honor a non-Virginian with his own holiday." That same year, he did feel the urge to honor one of Virginia's own. He co-sponsored a resolution expressing "regret and sorrow upon the loss" of William Munford Tuck, a politician who opposed every piece of civil rights legislation while in Congress during the 1950s and 1960s and promised "massive resistance" to the Supreme Court's 1954 decision banning segregation. [Passage from TNR]

3 - During High School, which he attended in Southern California, Allen drove around with a Confederate flag on his Mustang and posed for his formal yearbook picture wearing a Confederate flag pin.

4 - A confederate flag can be seen in the background of the very first ad Allen ran, when he ran for governor in 1993. I presume this was intended as some kind of signal to angry white Republicans, on the order of Ronald Reagan delivering his first major campaign speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were murdered in one of the 1960s' ugliest cases of racist violence. Reagen's speech, incidently, was a ringing declaration of his support for "states' rights" — a code word for resistance to black advances clearly understood by white Southern voters.

5 - And now a photo has surfaced of Allen posed alongside three men from the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), the racist and anti-Semitic organization formed in the 1950s and dedicated to preserving segregation in the South.

Republicans, are you ready to throw this guy overboard?

[Updated December 24, 2006]