“I am astonished as anyone has ever been that anyone is running for public office in Alabama on that platform,” he said.

Okay. I’ll give you three guesses on what platform somebody is ASTONISHED that a man is running in THE STATE OF ALABAMA for public office on.

The clock is ticking.

Democratic Party leaders are wondering what to do about a candidate for attorney general who denies the Holocaust occurred and wants to “reawaken white racial awareness.”

I don’t know where this “astonishment” comes from. After all, as the song goes, In Birmingham, we love our governor. But maybe I’m just exhibiting a bit of anti-Southern prejudice here.

Actually, this candidate does a double-whammy that I’d thought was impossible. Not only does he embarrass the great state of Alabama, but he embarrasses Atheists.

Larry Darby, the founder of the Atheist Law Center, made an abortive bid for the AG job as a Libertarian in 2002, but only recently have his views on race and the Holocaust come to light.

Which is what Atheism (and the more commonly held Secularism) needs down there in the Bible Belt: an association with Anti-Semitism and White Power. Did he found this organization before coming fore-bore public with his other views which, frankly are probably only slightly more controversial for Alabama than his Atheism?

Darby said he will speak Saturday near Newark, N.J., at a meeting of National Vanguard, which bills itself as an advocate for the white race. Some of his campaign materials are posted on the group’s Internet site.

“It’s time to stop pushing down the white man. We’ve been discriminated against too long,” Darby said in the interview.

The answer to the question of “what to do about him” is simply to have the other guy win the primary by as large a margin as possible, and then move on, never speaking to this guy again. It may be only a slight embarassment if he ends up in double digits, as oppossed to the regular band of misfits that crawl about in the back of election campaigns across the country with one or two percent of the vote. As it were, the Democratic Party of Alabama is crying over a man with twelve percent support in a poll with a five percent margin of error, and for all we know the bulk of the support comes from people who love the name “Darby”, or just know this sign and agree with the sentiment:

With or without the vaguely creepy white suit and hat.

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