Goode riddance

by Doug Thompson | Nov 24, 2008 | News

Virginia’s Board of Elections announces results today of the official canvas of election returns in the 5th Congressional District and is expected to certify the long-overdue demise of Congressman Virgil Goode’s embarassing political career.

The final result will show political novice Tom Perriello beat Goode (right) by a little over 700 votes. Even if Goode requests a recount, the margin should be enough to bring the curtain down on Goode’s 35-year-career.

The results show a growing electorate fed up with Goode’s racist and bigoted antics which too often brought shame on the Old Dominion.

As The Roanoke Times reports:

Goode has been criticized by pundits and other politicians on a national level over the past few years for his hard-line anti-immigration stances — a situation highlighted by his 2006 political brush-up with U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn. Ellison, a Muslim, decided to take his congressional oath using a Quran. Goode wrote at the time that more Muslims will be elected if the country doesn’t adopt anti-immigration stances — a position he carried into this year’s campaign.

But Goode was more than just a rabid right-winger on immigration. His politics crossed the line into outright racism. Over several campaigns, he paid racist GOP operative Bobby May nearly $100,000 for work. May, who also served as treasurer of the Buchanan County Republican Party, wrote a racist screed that cost him his job on the Presidential campaign of John McCain. Reports the Los Angeles Times:

A local newspaper columnist, in a spoof of Obama’s platform, wrote in one recent piece that the Democrat would hire the rapper Ludacris to paint the White House black (a reference to a pro-Obama song by Ludacris), and divert more foreign aid to Africa so "the Obama family there can skim enough to allow them to free their goats and live the American Dream." He joked that Obama would replace the 50 stars on the U.S. flag "with a star and crescent logo," an Islamic symbol, and that his policy on drugs would be to "raise taxes to pay for Obama’s inner-city political base."

The columnist, Bobby May, is also treasurer of the Buchanan County Republican Party and was listed in a July news release as the county’s representative on McCain’s Virginia leadership team, though he said his column reflected his views alone, and he denied it was racist.

Goode’s defeat is a positive sign that at least some of the overt racism that has long ruled rural Virginia is fading. Virginians sent another racist member of Congress — Sen. George Allen — packing in 2006. Terminating the career of Virgil Goode is welcome evidence that change may come slowly to the Commonwealth but it is coming.

UPDATE: Goode, of course, is not giving up. He announced Monday he will seek a recount.

14 Comments

Eric on November 24, 2008 at 10:25 pm

If things were so bad under Virgil Goode then how come he “hung around” for 35 years? I am not in his district and don’t have a vote but I was just wondering, he had to do something right.

As for George Allen, I have met him on several occassions and found him to be one of the most down to earth politicians ever. You applaud yourself for sending “another racist member of Congress packing in 2006.”

I am not sure where you get your facts but I sure would like to hear some of them. You make more blanket accusations than anyone I know. I would like to hear facts!! Not hearsay, not your opinion, the truth!!
Doug Thompson on November 25, 2008 at 6:59 am

Reports Wikipedia:

On August 11, 2006, at a campaign stop in Breaks, Virginia, near the Kentucky border, Allen twice used the word macaca to refer to S.R. Sidarth, an Indian-American, who was filming the event as a "tracker" for the opposing Webb campaign. Macaca means "monkey" and is commonly understood as a racial slur; it is generally used in francophone African nations, which led to speculation that Allen may have heard the epithet from his mother, a Francophone who grew up in French-colonial Tunisia. Allen apologized and later said that he did not know the meaning of the word. In 2008, The Washington Post speculated that, were it not for this single utterance, Allen would have been a strong candidate for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination.

On September 24, 2006, Salon.com Washington correspondent Michael Scherer reported that the magazine had interviewed nineteen of his teammates and that "[t]hree former college football teammates of Sen. George Allen say that the Virginia Republican repeatedly used the racial epithet ‘nigger’ and demonstrated racist attitudes toward blacks during the early 1970s." One of Allen’s classmates who made such a claim is University of Virginia political science professor Larry Sabato.

As a Republican political operative working for the national party in 1984, I heard Allen use racist terms during a GOP planning session in Richmond. I heard him use them again at a political fundraiser in Washington in `1991. At that time, I ran the Political Action Committee for the National Association of Realtors. I wrote about this on my political web site in 2006:

Allen, an incumbent thought safe just a few months ago, may go down Tuesday because of his personal bigotry and professional corruption. His stumbles started when he called a native Virginian of Indian descent "macaca" and increased when former classmates at the University of Virginia came forward to reveal Allen’s racist rhetoric while attending college.

That might have been forgivable had not Allen continued his racist ways after entering politics. I heard him call African-Americans "niggers" in 1984 and again in 1991. Others have since come forward to reveal a long history of racism and bigotry by the Virginia Senator.

But Allen is also a crook. An Associated Press investigation revealed he took millions in stock options from companies he helped while governor of Virginia. Then he tried to cover it up by failing to report the options on his financial disclosure reports.

Consider this signed statement from the former secretary and treasurer of the Charlottesville Republican Committee:

I have good reason to believe the "N-word" allegations about Allen. Reading and hearing about the recent allegations of George Allen using derogatory terms about people of different ethnicities doesn’t surprise me. I knew George well enough to be on a first name basis with him back in the early 90’s when I was active in the Charlottesville Republican Committee. I was secretary and treasurer of that committee at different times. We even had the party headquarters in the basement of George’s law office in those days.

We held meetings occasionally at a local motel conference room in town. The now defunct Mt. Vernon Motel. One evening, George attended our committee meeting there. In an adjoining conference room there were Mexican-Americans who were selling western ware. As I stood talking with George and the then committee chairman during a break making small talk the chairman suggested that George may want to look at some of the cowboy boots for sale in the other room as we knew of his affinity for the footwear. His response floored me. He looked at us both and said in a condescending tone that he would not buy anything from those "wetbacks." I looked at the chairman and he looked at me in total shock. The conversation quickly wrapped up and I walked away in total disbelief at what I had just heard. As this was an actual personal experience for me I am very inclined to believe the current allegations.

Salon reported this on September 27, 2006:

A former college football teammate of Sen. George Allen’s has confirmed details of a controversial hunting trip in the early 1970s, during which Allen is alleged to have placed a severed deer head in a mailbox that he believed to be owned by a black family.

On Sunday, Salon reported that Ken Shelton, a former teammate of Allen’s who works as a radiologist in North Carolina, claimed that Allen asked after a hunting trip for directions to a neighborhood populated by black residents. Shelton said Allen then drove him and another teammate, Billy Lanahan, to the area and put the severed head of a deer they had killed into a mailbox.

George Beam, a nuclear engineering company manager who lives outside Lynchburg, Va., now says he can confirm parts of that story. Beam, who played football with Allen, said he remembers Lanahan, who is now deceased, describing the hunting trip with Allen and Shelton.

"We were sitting around drinking beer," Beam said in an interview Wednesday morning, recalling the conversation with Lanahan. "Billy said, ‘George and Kenny and I went hunting, and we decided at some time to cut off this deer head and stick it in a mailbox.’"

Had I not personally heard Allen use racial epithets at political functions in 1984 and 1991 I might have been willing to give him the benefit of the doubt but his history of racism continued well beyond his college days. He’s a racist, pure and simple.

You found Allen to be "down to earth?" He’s a politician and can turn on the charm when necessary. In 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlin returned to England after a meeting with Adolph Hitler in Munich. Chamberlin told the British Press that he looked Hitler in the eye and found him to be "a reasonable man."

As for Goode, he began his political career as a Democrat but later switched to the GOP. At one time, he rabid right-wing positions fit the attitudes of many residents of the Southside. Virginia has changed. Goode hasn’t. That’s why he lost.
Eric on November 25, 2008 at 7:25 pm

Thanks for the cut and paste lesson from wikipedia. I believe that wikipedia is information that anyone can add and that does not have to be “proven.”

I will not argue with anything that you heard straight from the horses mouth (make joke now).

As for Goode, I am glad you cleared that up. Anyone that begins his career as a democrat and then changes to the GOP should have been voted out a long time ago. I mean I am not going to stand for any man that has a change of heart. Maybe the next time a politician changes parties we should hang them in fromt of the capital building.

I asked a simple question about why a man was in office for 35 years if he was so terrible and all I get is sarcasm from the peanut gallery and a one sentence answer from you saying he changed.

Like I said before I do not live in his district and did not follow him closely. Forgive me for trying to gain a little knowledge however left wing skewed it would be.
Bob on November 24, 2008 at 10:27 am

With the head kook retired from Southside politics, maybe now the region can attract the kind of businesses that will bring good jobs and new prosperity. Virginia suffered under Virgil Goode and hopefully we have seen the last of him, or any of the suckers that may want to sprout from his roots. Onward, and upward Southside!
Jack Russell on November 25, 2008 at 9:58 am

Here is a little fact for you:

Blogs are vehicles for personal expression. Information included in blogs is most often presented from a particular point of view. Blogs are opinions.

If you want truth, try more trusted sources such as Air America, Democracy Now, Democratic Underground, and the like.
Jack Russell on November 25, 2008 at 8:07 pm

Hey, it’s just the “peanut gallery” weighing back in.

I thought a little sarcasm was called for since you pontificated that you didn’t want opinion from a blog. Apparently you feel you deserved so very much more. My bad.

So in fairness, this time, I will refer you to a couple of other more centrist websites that should be of great value to you:

lightenup.org and senseofhumortransplants.com
Doug Thompson on November 26, 2008 at 3:10 am

The vast majority of info came from other news sources, including Salon and The Washington Post.

I tried to answer your question in a straightforward manner but your response makes me wonder if you are interested in an open discussion or if you just want to argue for the argument’s sake. You obviously come from a partisan point of view (your comment about not caring for anyone who was once a Democrat suggests that) so I’m left with the conclusion that you approach the issue from the right side of the political fence.

However, as you and I have discussed here before, I tend to discount opinions from those who hide behind screen names and free email addresses. Jack is welcome to his opinion and he has the courage to express with by backing it up with his real and full name.

If you want to debate Eric, do it honestly and openly. Don’t dismiss my response with the false claim that it was based only on a "cut and paste" from Wikipedia when I, in fact, quoted multiple sources. Such tactics suggest you have no interest in facts and that your only purpose here is to disrupt discussion on this blog. If that is true, do it elsewhere. It is not welcome here.
Carol Anderson on November 26, 2008 at 11:33 am

Based on Eric’s behavior in previous threads, I doubt very much if he is really interested in facts. He is a Republican who is upset that his party got stomped in the election earlier this month.

Eric, Doug answered your questions with multiple citations from multiple sources. That you chose to ignore that is your failing, not his. Your party lost. It deserved to lose. Get over it.