Salon.com today reports that U.S. Senator George Allen (R-Virginia) “repeatedly used an inflammatory racial epithet and demonstrated racist attitudes toward blacks during the early 1970s.” We’re talking “N-Word” here, a hateful and ugly sentiment.

“It was so common with George when he was among his white friends. This is the terminology he used,” the teammate said.

A third white teammate contacted separately, who also spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of being attacked by the Virginia senator, said he too remembers Allen using the word “n*****,” though he said he could not recall a specific conversation in which Allen used the term. “My impression of him was that he was a racist,” the third teammate said.

Salon.com used the entire word. I will not have it on this site in any context.

Leon Wolf comments on the part of the quotation highlighted above:

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I’m sorry, but this is ridiculous. George Allen is a friggin’ Senator. Senators do not have goonies of pipe-wielding fiends at their disposal, they have staffers: people fresh out of ivy-league colleges with their political science degrees; a fearsome lot, to be sure. What exactly are they afraid of, that Allen will take a running haymaker at them in the midst of a campaign? Keep in mind, these two individuals are slinging an accusation that Allen is a racist, that he used racist epithets, etc., and are doing so in a very public forum. The only thing they have legitimately to fear is that Allen might respond in kind - say, by calling them liars. This is not a concern that people who are not lying have. I rather suspect that the actual concern is that if their real names are exposed, others on the team or who were close to the situation will be able to conclusively identify whether they were ever in a position to have known what they claim to know, and they will be exposed as frauds. Alternately, they may be afraid that if their names are revealed, people will be able to, say, check their contribution records, or otherwise determine if their motives are less than pure. I’m more than content at this point to write the two anonymous sources off as either hacks, liars, or outright fabrications of Salon to bolster the one named source they were able to find.

If Salon were a reputable news organization, they should be scolded for this stunt: Using anonymous sources to smear a candidate and influence the outcome of an election. It makes one wonder, rhetorically, if the quotes were faxed to Mike Scherer from a Kinkos in Abilene.

Salon.com is a tabloid without a supermarket. They contribute nothing of merit to the online political dialogue and should return to writing dKos diaries.