"George Allen" is one of the names inscribed in gilded letters in Wonkette's Book of Legends. For those of you too young to remember, he was a senator from Virginia and considered a viable candidate for the Republican nomination in 2008, but before he could become George W. Bush II: The Bushening, he had to win re-election in 2006. This went hilariously wrong, as it did for many Republicans that year, starting with him calling the Indian-American dude who was paid by the Democrats to follow the campaign around with a camcorder "macaca," which is apparently a weird ethnic slur of some kind. It also came out that maybe he used some less hilarious racial epithets when he was in college, and also put a severed deer's head in a black family's mailbox. Next, it turned out his mother was a secret Jew, which he had a dumb freakout about. Then he didn't get re-elected. BUT! Jim Webb, the Democrat and gun-crazed maniac who beat Allen, is now leaving the Senate in disgust, and Allen has decided to run for is old seat again. Which meant that this year should have been full of fun macaca times, and yet it ... hasn't been? WHOSE FAULT IS THIS? What evil spell have the Jews placed on George Allen, in a plot to reduce Wonkette's pageviews?
A quick look at Wonkette's George Allen tag reveals that he's done nothing worth making fun of since yet another run-in with a video camera in December 2011. The Washington Post has an extremely long article about why George Allen is boring now, which is mostly about how losing the election in '06 brought him a new humility, etc. The result has been the end of fun.
"His energy would fill up a room," says Virginia Tech communications professor Robert Denton, a close observer of Allen’s style for more than three decades. "This year, you don’t see the old George Allen -- wearing funny hats, throwing the football, telling jokes. He’s self-editing now. You can see kind of a transformation, a genuine regret after a humbling experience."
UGH, SELF-EDITING NO NO NO. THIS IS DEATH FOR US. Also note the reference to the fact that he's abandoned his beloved prop football. Instead of carrying it around and drawing on its secret power, he has literally placed it on a shelf, next to ... well, you'd better brace yourself.
George Allen displays three totems on the top shelf of the bookcase in his Old Town Alexandria office. The bust of Thomas Jefferson is a natural; Allen’s first elective office three decades ago was Jefferson’s seat in the Virginia House of Delegates.
There’s a football, of course, an inevitable nod toward Allen’s father, the longtime Washington Redskins coach.
And then there’s the latest addition to the showcase: a shofar, the ram’s horn that Jews blow to signal the annual time of repentance.
Allen was given the shofar at a Lubavitcher confab he attended in 2010. Did he dare to place his baptized-in-the-name-of-Christ lips upon it?
At that meeting, he tried to blow the horn, a difficult task even for some rabbis. "I couldn’t get much of a sound out of it," Allen says, but that night, "I had the best dreams."
Well, there you have it: George Allen has had his mojo stolen by this sinister Hebraic magical item, which sent him "good dreams" to lull him into complacency. And that's why Nate Silver's Math and Numbers Emporium only gives Allen a 20% chance of winning the election, which means we won't have to think about him again after November 6, the end. [WP]
