Maybe the Deer's Name was Khartoum

Karma catches up with you, Senator.

Salon's ad-based view is actually working for me today:

A former college football teammate of Sen. George Allen's has confirmed details of a controversial hunting trip in the early 1970s, during which Allen is alleged to have placed a severed deer head in a mailbox that he believed to be owned by a black family.

On Sunday, Salon reported that Ken Shelton, a former teammate of Allen's who works as a radiologist in North Carolina, claimed that Allen asked after a hunting trip for directions to a neighborhood populated by black residents. Shelton said Allen then drove him and another teammate, Billy Lanahan, to the area and put the severed head of a deer they had killed into a mailbox.

George Beam, a nuclear engineering company manager who lives outside Lynchburg, Va., now says he can confirm parts of that story. Beam, who played football with Allen, said he remembers Lanahan, who is now deceased, describing the hunting trip with Allen and Shelton.

"We were sitting around drinking beer," Beam said in an interview Wednesday morning, recalling the conversation with Lanahan. "Billy said, 'George and Kenny and I went hunting, and we decided at some time to cut off this deer head and stick it in a mailbox.'"

Beam said he does not remember Lanahan saying that the incident was racially motivated. He also said Lanahan did not specify who had the idea to put the deer head in the mailbox.

In a press appearance Monday, Allen dismissed Shelton's claims as "absolutely false," "pure fabrication" and "nonsense," according to the Washington Post.

Beam said he was motivated to speak to a reporter about his memory because of recent attacks against Shelton's integrity by people close to the Allen campaign, a group that includes several former teammates. "I knew Kenny Shelton, and his reputation in my opinion is irreproachable," Beam said Wednesday morning, adding that he had not spoken to Shelton in decades.

Lanahan died this year at the age of 53. His aunt, Martha Belle Chisholm, told Salon last week that Lanahan's family owned land near Bumpass, Va., about 50 miles east of the University of Virginia campus, where Allen played football in college. Chisholm said she remembered Lanahan speaking highly of Allen.

Beam played as a quarterback and a wide receiver on the University of Virginia football team during the 1972, '73 and '74 seasons. Beam said he lived with Lanahan between 1971 and 1973. Beam described himself as a political independent who leans "more Republican than anything," and has not yet decided whether to vote for Allen in November.

In the Post Wednesday, Chris LaCivita, a consultant for the Allen campaign, suggested that Shelton had fabricated the deer head story because a similar incident had been reported in North Carolina in January. Shelton said he had never heard of the North Carolina report, and called LaCivita's allegation ridiculous.

More stories like this, and the Senator's political career might be sleeping with Luca Brasi...and the fishes.