Re: your post
"Stick a fork in it.... all done!
Not if the MSM continues to ignore the story. I haven't yet seen a reference to this in the Wash Post or Richmond Times Dispatch, or the network affiliates in NoVa.
Plenty of Bush-bashing and non-news analysis articles on things like "what shaped Webb" on the front page, however."
1. Your fork metaphor was the snap judgment by many this morning, but very premature
2. It isn't just the big bad MSM that is ridiculing George Allen's Hail Mary Pass to Drudge, but some of the leading lights of the right are disappointed once again in Allen's total failure both in the present campaign and as a self-proclaimed 2008 presidential campaigner. Examples?
http://www.nationalreview.com/ The Webb Excerpts [John Podhoretz at National Review
Sometimes I'm embarrassed to be on the Right. The outbreak of cynical Babbitry on the part of the George Allen campaign in using sentences from novels written by James Webb against Webb makes this day one of those days
http://www.slate.com/id/2152408 Review of leading conservative blogs:
"Are the passages in Webb's 'Lost Soldiers' bizarre and perverted? Yes," writes popular conservative blogger Michelle Malkin. "But they are no more proof of Webb's immorality and unfitness for office than the passages in 'Sisters' are proof that Lynne Cheney hates men or that the passages in 'The Apprentice' are proof that Scooter Libby endorses sex between children and bears."
Kathryn Jean Lopez at the National Review's The Corner finds the Allen salvo against fiction "lame and unbecoming," though she also wonders how graphic the excerpts would have been in the Washington Post [note: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.] had a Republican penned them. As it happens, a prominent Republican didn't mind reading them: "Would this be a bad time to mention that John McCain wrote a blurb for [Lost Soldiers]?" Lopez adds.
...
Fellow righty Allah Pundit at Hot Air sees using a candidate's literature against him as the nadir of a particularly nasty election year: "The story's about Vietnam; maybe he's describing some obscure cultural practice that he encountered there. Or, just maybe, he made it up. Have we actually reached the point where Senate seats now turn on the sex scandals of fictional characters?"
But this is one that is going to hurt when Allen looks in the mirror tonight, one of many to point it out:
http://rightwingnuthouse.com/archives/2006/10/27/enough-is-enough-2/ Rick Moran at conservative Rightwing Nuthouse: "There must be limits beyond which a candidate is penalized for exceeding. The absolutely disgusting nature of the passages quoted in the Allen press release fills that bill. The fact that they are quoting pieces of fiction obviates only slightly Webb's startling and disturbing imaginative wanderings into the sexual dark side of the human mind as it also reveals the depths to which Allen's honor and integrity have sunk." Congratulations, George Allen. You’ve hit the jackpot... I don’t link to porn.), Allen may very well have sealed his victory by “outing” Webb’s fictional day dreams but he has lost his soul in the process.