Posted on 10/27/2006 8:19:01 AM PDT by elhombrelibre
Webb Says His Novels 'Inappropriate' for News Radio By Nathan Burchfiel CNSNews.com Staff Writer October 27, 2006
(CNSNews.com) - In an interview on Washington Post Radio Friday morning, Jim Webb, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Virginia, said excerpts of his novels are "a little bit inappropriate" to be read on news radio.
"I don't know why you're reading that on WTOP," Webb told host Mark Plotkin. "I think it's a little bit inappropriate."
Plotkin was reading an excerpt from Webb's novel "Something to Die For," in which Webb describes a female stripper performing sexual acts with a banana.
"I don't think that's appropriate for you to read on WTOP," Webb said again as Plotkin finished the excerpt. (Washington Post Radio is WTOP's sister station.)
The campaign of Republican Sen. George Allen on Thursday released excerpts from some of the war novels Webb wrote between 1978 and 2002. The books include some graphic sexual passages, as well as frequent uses of a racial slur for blacks and descriptions of Vietnamese women as "monkey-faced."
Among the excerpts is a scene from the 2002 novel "Lost Soldiers," in which a man embraces his four-year-old son and places the boy's penis in his mouth.
Webb said the release of the excerpts was "a Karl Rove campaign tactic" and a "classic example of the way this campaign has worked. It's smear after smear."
He defended his fiction as "illuminative."
"It's not a sexual act," Webb told Plotkin regarding the "Lost Soldiers" excerpt. "I actually saw this happen in a slum in Bangkok when I was there as a journalist."
"The duty of a writer is to illuminate his surroundings," he added.
Coincidentally, a Cambodian woman in Las Vegas is facing sexual assault charges for performing a similar act on her young son, according to an Oct. 14 report in the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
The article quotes an office manager for the Cambodian Association of America, who described the act as a sign of respect or love. Webb criticized the Allen campaign for focusing on excerpts from his novels.
"The most important issue facing the country, he hasn't got a statement to make on it," Webb said of the Iraq war. "This country's been breaking into pieces economically ... they've got no position on that.
And stoning to death is a pretty common way of dealing with marital infidelity in Iran. So is chopping off the hands of teenagers caught shoplifting. Just because it's common somewhere don't make it right or acceptable.
I'm reminded of how the British stamped out suttee, the practice of burning a living widow on the funeral pyre of her dead husband. A local Raj explained to a British officer that it was a long-standing Indian custom and that they would have to proceed with it. The British officer replied that it was a long-standing custom in Britain that they hung people who did such deeds and therefore the Raj was free to build the funeral pyre for the widow, but the British soldiers would construct a gallows alongside it to ensure their long-standing custom was fulfilled as well.
Have you ever read a graphic account of a stoning? Would you consider such an account shocking? Would you want it read on the radio or on 24-hour tv news? I would turn off the tv or the radio if such were occurring. And if I were an author, I would tell a radio talk show host that the subject is inappropriate for reading over the airwaves. It's fine for an adult to buy a book and read it. In general, folks have an idea about what they are purchasing.
Yes, but they are a compassionate ungodly menagerie of com/symp socialist crooks, sex perverts, baby killers, child molesters, homosexuals, treasonous unpatriotic cut and run weak kneed enemy coddler's, trial lawyers, satanist/atheists, and imbeciles.
So let's elect them.
And Rudyard Kipling mentioned suttee in his writings - did that make him a bad person?
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