See, here’s the thing…

Most people aren’t dumb. There are a lot of ignorant people, and there are certainly, especially in politics, a lot of people who like to play dumb, but most of them aren’t. And when they play dumb, what they’re really doing is treating us like we’re dumb, which is why we should always look behind the innocent façades and the claims of gosh-darn-shucks-stupidity, because when we do, we find things like the Downing Street Memo, and Dick Armitage’s signature on the PNAC letter, and George Allen’s long history with the Council of Conservative Citizens, a group which was created from the mailing list of the old white supremacist White Citizens Councils and has been noted as becoming increasingly “radical and racist” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which classifies the CCC as a hate group.

Asked whether Allen supports or deplores the CCC, John Reid, his communications director pleaded ignorance. "I am unaware of the group you mention or their agenda and because we have no record of the Senator having involvement with them I cannot offer you any opinion on them," Reid told me in an e-mail response.

Oops.

In 1996, when Governor Allen entered the Washington Hilton Hotel to attend the Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual gathering of conservative movement organizations, he strode to a booth at the entrance of the exhibition hall festooned with two large Confederate flags--a booth operated by the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), at the time a co-sponsor of CPAC. After speaking with CCC founder and former White Citizens Council organizer Gordon Lee Baum and two of his cohorts, Allen suggested that they pose for a photograph with then-National Rifle Association spokesman and actor Charlton Heston. The photo appeared in the Summer 1996 issue of the CCC's newsletter, the Citizens Informer.

Yeah. There’s a lot more at the link.

People like George Allen—and George Bush—aren’t fools. They just like to play us for fools. The soft bigotry of low expectations indeed.

If we learn anything from this reign of heinous miscreants, let it be that if something whiffs of shit, that’s probably because it’s emanating from someone who’s full of it.