FOLLOW UP: GEORGE ALLEN'S "JEWISH BLOOD"

AS I POSTED YESTERDAY, DURING A SENATORIAL DEBATE A NEWS REPORTER TRIED TO "OUT" REPUBLICAN GEORGE ALLEN AS HAVING JEWISH ANCESTORS. ALLEN EXPRESSED THE APPROPRIATE SHOCK AT THE REPORTERS IDIOTIC QUESTION. TODAY HE ISSUED A FORMAL STATEMENT.

"Yesterday, I found it especially reprehensible that a reporter would impugn the attitudes of my mother, as Ms. Fox did in her first question. My mother and father both taught me to abhor bigotry, and Ms. Fox's suggestion to the contrary was deeply offensive.

"The notion peddled by the Webb campaign that I am somehow embarrassed by my heritage is equally offensive, and also absurd.

"I was raised as a Christian and my mother was raised as a Christian. And I embrace and take great pride in every aspect of my diverse heritage, including my Lumbroso family line's Jewish heritage, which I learned about from a recent magazine article and my mother confirmed ...

"Some may find it odd that I have not probed deeply into the details of my family history, but it's a fact. We in the Allen household were simply taught that what matters is a person's character, integrity, effort, and performance - not race, gender, ethnicity or religion. And so whenever we would ask my mother through the years about our family background on her side, the answer always was, 'Who cares about that?'

HotAir points out that Dean Barnett, himself a member of the tribe, has written a trilogy of outrage on this subject directed respectively at (a) the dopey reporter who took such an unusually intent interest in when and whether the Senator’s mother had ceased being a Jew, (b) Olbermann manque Andrew Sullivan, who attributed Barnett’s disgust at the reporter’s question to some phantom fear that Jew-hatin’ southern conservatives would turn on Allen once they knew the truth, and (c) Jim Webb’s nutroots coordinator, Lowell Feld, who plopped out the filthiest bit of ethnic demagoguery you’ll see all day over at, where else, the Daily Kos. Note in particular Feld’s references to Allen by his middle name, Felix.