Yes, I agree with Michelle Malkin and Right-Wing Nuthouse that it was very dirty pool for Virginia’s GOP Gov. George Allen to release those explicit sex-passages from the novels of his Dem challenger for a Senate seat James Webb (you can find them all on Drudge, and I’m not going to quote from them, except to note that Webb’s tastes in fictionalized eros run to the bizarro, including that gratuitous scene of a father’s pedophiliac oral-sex incest with his 9-year-old boy that I’ll chastely acronym-o-nize as PTBPIHM). It appears in a 2001 novel of Webb’s, “Lost Soldiers,” set in Vietnam (he served there as a Marine) like most of the rest of his writings.
Malkin and the Nuthouse are absolutely correct that none of this should disqualify Webb–or anyone else–from holding a seat in the United States Senate–although I’ve also got to agree with Allah of Hot Air (and again, I’m bowdlerizing with the acronym PTBPIHM) :
“Yeah, there’s no getting away from ‘[he] turned him upside down, and [PTBPIHM].’ Once you’re famous for having written something like that, you’re famous for having written something like that. If he beats Allen, they might as well refer to him that way when calling the roll. “…Mr. Obama; Mr. Pryor; Mr. [PTBPIHM]….”
Nonetheless, I, um…can’t stop laughing.
You see, Webb, who, strangely enough, portrays himself as a down-home rube from southwest Virginia (and wears down-home rube-shoes with his business suits to prove it) even though he’s spent his entire career writing novels and Hollywood screenplays except for a brief stint as secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan during his brief life as a Republican, is the darling of the liberal media, who love to contrast him with Allen, who is supposed to be a racist because he called someone of East Indian descent a “macaca” (whatever that is) and sometimes said and did Not Very Nice Things when he was in high school.
Here is an excerpt from a Washington Post profile of Allen:
“Others say Allen acted out at school. Tim Good, a classmate, said he had to confront the 6-foot-plus Allen after his younger brother reported that Allen had stolen his bicycle.
“‘George Allen was a big bully,’ said Good, now an accountant in Torrance, Calif. Allen denied stealing the bike, but Good said it reappeared at school the next day.”
And here is an excerpt from a Washington Post profile of Webb:
“About a year ago, before he was running for the Senate, James Webb took a colleague to the mountains of southwest Virginia to do some research for a movie they were working on.
“Rob Reiner , meet my cousin Jewel and her husband, Buck. Jewel made a home-cooked meal for Webb and his producer-director friend. She pointed across the way to a nearby hollow and said:
“‘Ah wuz bawn rat ovah theyah.’ That’s Reiner on the phone from Los Angeles, doing a mountain accent.”
My first thought was: What’s a supposed good ol’ boy doing palling around with Rob Reiner? (Reiner is a major donor to the Webb campaign–and he’s also, in case you forgot, the guy who tried unsuccessfully to persuade Californians that what they really needed was dip into their pockets and fund a gazillion-dollar “universal preschool” program.)
My next thought was: How do you think the southwest Virginia mountain folk are going to feel about Webb when they read that his Hollywood big-shot buddy Carl Reiner makes fun of the way they talk?
So I’d already pegged Webb for a phony whose redneck veneer could fool only a Washington Post staff writer. Then I read this about Webb: “[W}e kid ourselves if we don’t say that we need more revenues.”
Need more revenues? That’s my federal taxes you’re talking about raising, buddy.
And then also, there is something very odd about those sex-passages in Webb’s books. Here’s what Right Wing News, who essentially broke the story here and here, says about the PTBPIHM scene, which, as you can see, serves no purpose in furthering the plot or explaining the characters:
“Folks, I will grant you that this is a work of fiction, but it’s still a very strange and disturbing passage and are you going to try to tell me that a Senate candidate writing graphic descriptions of pedophilia and incest isn’t a story? Come on! It goes without saying that any Republican who wrote this sort of thing and ran for office would be absolutely ripped into a thousand pieces by the mainstream media. Meanwhile, the MSM isn’t even showing the people of Virginia these passages so that they can make up their own minds about how relevant they are. It’s just typical media bias.”
But what really gets me about that passage is that it’s–really bad writing. Here it is in toto:
“A shirtless man walked toward them along a mud pathway. His muscles were young and hard, but his face was devastated with wrinkles. His eyes were so red that they appeared to be burned by fire. A naked boy ran happily toward him from the little plot of dirt. The man grabbed his young son in his arms, turned him upside down, and [PTBPIHM].
“Dzung walked a few steps further, uneasy in these raw surroundings. ‘What do they call this place?’
“‘They call it Klong Toey,’ said Manh, enjoying his status as an expert travel guide.”
Klong Toey? I began laughing so hard that tears ran down my cheeks.
Hmm, all I can say is that James Webb is some pretty deep Klong Toey right now.