Nice of the Washington Post to, yet again, ignore the fact that Macaca isn't just a genus of monkey - in French it's also a slur for dark-skinned people of North Africa, and George Allen's French-speaking French mother just happened to come from North Africa. No, that's not relevant to the story, but the genus of Macaca in Latin is. Uh huh.
Can you people ever just report the facts and let the public be mature enough to figure things out for themselves? We're big boys, we don't need the Washington Post censoring the news.
From the Wash Post, page 1:
Sanjay Puri, the leader of the nation's largest Indian political action committee and a longtime Allen supporter, said he will lead a delegation of Indian business executives and community leaders to meet with Allen on Wednesday to express dismay.Even the banner publication of the conservative movement, The National Review, is joining in the Allen-bashing:
"The comments are very insensitive. That's what we want to find out: How can we continue working with him?" Puri said. "The senator has had a very good relationship with our community. I was pretty surprised -- you can say shocked."
Mark Potok, director of the intelligence project for the Southern Poverty Law Center, based in Montgomery, Ala., said it was "simply impossible to believe" that Allen did not intend the comments as a racial insult.
"To me, it looks like yet another case of a politician pandering to the worst instincts in an all-white crowd," Potok said.
Rich Lowry, editor of the conservative National Review, wrote on the magazine's Web site Tuesday that he did not think Allen was "trying to speak a coded racist language." But Lowry said Allen showed he "has a mean streak."More background here and here.
