This entry was posted on 10/31/2006 1:38 PM and is filed under Election 2006, All Posts.
In case you missed it over the weekend, Sen. George Allen's campaign has resorted to attacking Democratic opponent Jim Webb for the content of his widely read war novels:
In the release, titled "Webb's Weird World," which was released to and displayed on the Drudge Report Web site, the Allen campaign also asserted that Mr. Webb's writings were filled with "chauvinistic attitudes and sexually exploitive references."
Mr. Webb, who was secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration, has written six novels about the military and wartime, including "Fields of Fire," an acclaimed 1978 work about the Vietnam War, according to his campaign Web site.
Kristian Denny Todd, a spokeswoman for the Webb campaign, said that a scene in "Lost Soldiers" that describes a father placing his naked son's penis in his mouth involved a cultural expression of affection that Mr. Webb had witnessed as a journalist in Thailand. "He doesn't get it," she said. "But it's a cultural thing."
Ms. Denny Todd said that fiction writers often wrote about things that they do not condone. She added: "It's fiction."
As a response, I feel that right-wing columnist John Fund of the Wall Street Journal puts it best:
As for Mr. Webb's lurid writing, liberal pro-Webb blogger Bob Cesca points out that Mr. Allen made a cameo appearance in the Ted Turner-produced Civil War movie "Gods and Generals" and "Senator Allen is seen in the movie singing the Bonnie Blue Flag lyric, 'Hurrah! Hurrah! For Southern rights, hurrah!' implying, in part, the right to own slaves." Adds Mr. Cesca: "Senator Allen, when you boil it right down, portrayed a traitor against the United States. An insurgent, if you will."
Senator Allen's defense against such a silly charge would be, of course, that the movie was fictional and he was portraying someone who didn't actually exist. Similarly, Mr. Webb's writings are fiction and his characters aren't real people.
And that's speaking charitably of Mr. Allen, whom, as Today's Lies readers know, moonlights as our country's strangest fetishist of Virginia's Confederate legacy.
