The New Republic cleverly subtitles this Ryan Lizza story about Sen. George Allen’s race problem (featuring his wearing a Confederate-flag pin in a high school yearbook photo) "Pin Prick."

Having read the article, though, I’d have to say Allen’s problem seems to have less to do with wearing the pin than generally being a prick.

Let’s just take a few of the more disturbing passages:

As the scrum breaks up, Allen turns away
and spits a long brown streak of saliva into the dirt, just missing one
of his constituents, a carefully put-together, blonde, ponytailed woman
approaching the senator for an autograph. She stops in her tracks and
stares with disgust at the bubbly tobacco juice that almost landed on
her feet. Without missing a beat, Allen’s communications director, John
Reid, reassures her: "That’s just authenticity!"

Yes, being a pig is very "authentic." Then there’s this:

George Allen is the oldest
child of legendary football coach George Herbert Allen, and, when his
father was on the road, young George often acted as a surrogate dad to
his siblings. According to his sister Jennifer, he was particularly
strict about bedtimes. One night, his brother Bruce stayed up past his
bedtime. George threw him through a sliding glass door. For the same
offense, on a different occasion, George tackled his brother Gregory
and broke his collarbone. When Jennifer broke her bedtime curfew,
George dragged her upstairs by her hair.

George tormented Jennifer enough that, when she grew up, she wrote a
memoir of what it was like living in the Allen family. In one sense,
the book, Fifth Quarter, from which these details are culled,
is unprecedented. No modern presidential candidate has ever had such a
harsh and personal account of his life delivered to the public by a
close family member. The book paints Allen as a cartoonishly sadistic
older brother who holds Jennifer by her feet over Niagara Falls on a
family trip (instilling in her a lifelong fear of heights) and slams a
pool cue into her new boyfriend’s head. "George hoped someday to become
a dentist," she writes. "George said he saw dentistry as a perfect
profession–getting paid to make people suffer."

Again, charming. If half of this is true, George Allen is a dangerous psychopath.

Then, of course, there’s Allen’s lifelong affection for the Confederacy, which makes little sense for a guy neither born nor raised in the South:

In high school, Allen’s "Hee Haw"
persona made him a polarizing figure. "He rode a little red Mustang
around with a Confederate flag plate on the front," says Patrick
Campbell, an old classmate, who now works for the Public Works
Department in Manhattan Beach, California. "I mean, it was
absurd-looking in our neighborhood." Hurt Germany, who now lives in
Paso Robles, California, explodes with anger at the mention of Allen’s
name. "The guy is horrible," she complains. "He drove around with a
Confederate flag on his Mustang. I can’t believe he’s going to run for
president." Another classmate, who asks that I not use her name, also
remembers Allen’s obsession with Dixie: "My impression is that he was a
rebel. He plastered the school with Confederate flags."

Politically, Allen’s years in Palos Verdes were dominated by the
lingering racial tensions from the riots in nearby Watts in 1965–when
that neighborhood was practically burned to the ground–and the
nationwide riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
in 1968, which left other parts of Southern California in flames. It is
with that context in mind that four former classmates and one former
administrator at Allen’s high school described to me an event for which
Allen is most remembered–and the first glimpse that the château-raised
Californian might grow up to become a defender of the South’s heritage.

It was the night before a major basketball game with Morningside
High. The mostly black inner-city school adjacent to Watts was coming
to the almost entirely white Palos Verdes High to play. When students
arrived at school on game day, they found graffiti spray-painted on the
school library and other places. All five people who described the
incident say the graffiti was racially tinged and meant to look like
the handiwork of the black Morningside students. But it was actually
put there by Allen and some of his friends. "It was something like die whitey,"
says Campbell. The school administrator, who says he is a Republican
and would "seriously consider" voting for Allen for president, says the
graffiti said, "burn, baby, burn," a reference to the race riots.

In the piece, Allen seems to dispute some of the details of all of this. But not with much conviction or certainty. Mainly he claims he doesn’t remember it all that well. There’s no denying the flag pin in the photograph.

This should put a pretty serious dent in Allen’s presidential ambitions. He looks more and more like every unfair stereotype of George W. Bush made flesh.

So, the book’s done.

I exist again.

More TK.