Sen. George Allen To Officially Stop Digging

What's the best advice if you're an asshole in a hole? Stop digging, right? Sen. George Allen, the embattled Republican incumbent from Virginia, can't seem to catch a break these days.

Here's his apology to a black group for his youthful infatuation with the Confederate battle flag:

"What I was slow to appreciate and wish I had understood much sooner," Allen told a black audience last month, "is that this symbol . . . is, for black Americans, an emblem of hate and terror, an emblem of intolerance and intimidation."

Which led to this outburst–and call for a new apology–from the Sons of Confederate Veterans:

"He's apologizing to others, certainly he should apologize to us as well," said B. Frank Earnest Sr., the Virginia commander of the confederate group at a news conference. "We're all aware, ourselves included, of the statements that got him into this. The infamous macaca statement. He's using our flag to wipe the muck from his shoes that he's now stepped in."

More here, from the Wash Post.

Reason Managing Editor and North Carolina native Jesse Walker looked at the right-wing embrace of identity politics here. And he wrote about an odd permutation of the Confederate battle flag here.