Agreed. Attacking fictional passages seems like a non-starter to me. If this is the RPV's bigh push for this final weekend, VA Republicans should be damn worried about Tuesday and make sure they drag every Republican they know out to the polls.
A much more important question about Webb and his character is how a man who used to defend the Vietnam grunt can now accept endorsement and support from somebody like John Kerry. The Webb campaign happily trumpeted Kerry's endorsement, at which point a fair question would have been, "How can Webb accept support from Kerry, who - while still on active duty - organized North Vietnamese-sponsored show trials to condemn US servicemen?"
Attacking novels? Pffff... useless. Maybe a few nanny-staters will get their panties in a bunch over this. But really, "exposing" passages about forced oral sex and clever ways to cut a banana... that's just gonna get the Democrat base very excited about Webb.
Have you read them? Would you proud to write something similar and gift them to your children and grandchildren?
A much more important question about Webb and his character is how a man who used to defend the Vietnam grunt can now accept endorsement and support from somebody like John Kerry. The Webb campaign happily trumpeted Kerry's endorsement, at which point a fair question would have been, "How can Webb accept support from Kerry, who - while still on active duty - organized North Vietnamese-sponsored show trials to condemn US servicemen?"
An excellent post.
Not quite, IMHE. It will get the NAMBLA and the feminist Democrat base excited. But the yellow-dog Democrat base? No. They are not going to be able to wrap their heads fast enuff around PelosiDem "culture of corruption" Foley-gate, to rebound soon enough to "endorsing" the pedophilia verbiage as "acceptable".
Foley-gate raised such a furor, and the MSM has been so enabling with keeping it alive, it taints the Begala defense of "it's just art/fiction".
That's a question that should be answered, particularly since Webb has been critical of Kerry in the past. And yes, he's been critical of GWB too. But he's still critical of GWB, he has to explain the flip flop on Kerry.
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To be sure, Kerry deserves condemnation for his activities as the leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (WAW). In the early 1970s,this small organization - never more than 7,000 veterans out of a potential pool of 9 million- became the darling of the anti-war movement and the liberal media. Its activities went far beyond simply criticizing the politics of the war to repeatedly and dishonestly misrepresenting the service of Vietnam veterans and the positive feelings most felt after serving.
Kerry and his WAW compatriots portrayed their fellow veterans as unwilling soldiers, morally debased and haunted by their service. While this might have fit a small minority, the most accurate survey, done by the Harris Poll in 1980, showed that 91% of those who went to Vietnam were "glad they served their country," 74%"enjoyed their time in the military" and 89% agreed with the statement that "our troops were asked to fight in a war which our political leaders in Washington would not let them win."
Kerry's own comments were filled with hyperbolic exaggerations that sought to make egregious acts seem commonplace. During a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in 1971, he testified that fellow veterans had routinely "raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan. "With those words, he defamed a generation of honorable men. No matter how he spins it today, at a minimum, he owes them a full and complete apology.
The view that Kerry remained on the "wrong side" of the war was compounded by his failure to consult with leaders of America's million-plus Vietnamese community while playing a dominant role in the normalization of relations with communist Vietnam during the early 1990s. Many Vietnamese-Americans believe Kerry has been an apologist for the Hanoi government on such key issues as human rights. Kerry personally has bottled up the Vietnamese Human Rights Act, which twice passed the House by wide majorities, so that it cannot even be debated on the Senate floor.
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By contrast, Kerry's leadership of Vietnam Veterans Against the War is not only fair game; it speaks to legitimate issues of loyalty, and his actions at that time are the true core of this dispute. For most veterans it was not that Kerry was against the war, but that he used his military credentials to denigrate the service of a whole generation of veterans. The Vietnam Veterans Against the War was a very small, highly radical organization. Their stories of atrocious conduct, repeated in lurid detail by Kerry before the Congress, represented not the typical experience of the American soldier, but its ugly extreme. That the articulate, urbane Kerry would validate such allegations helped to make life hell for many Vietnam veterans, for a very long time.