Fuck:
Jim Webb. *shudder*
Now that you've had time to recover from that unpleasant image (warning: not the last one this post), let's review the pros and cons of Senator Webb (D-VA) as Obama's VP pick. Like your average skinny pale urban lefty who's never fired a gun (my family's lineage includes draft-dodgers from four continents in at least five separate wars) and generally likes the stuff white people like, I'm a big Jim Webb fan. Chris' post below highlights five considerations to look at when picking a VP, and Webb helps with at least three of them. He's from Virginia, an electorally significant swing state Obama is making a serious push for. His military heroism and leadership experience shores up Obama's foreign policy inexperience, and he is a self-described proud redneck Appalachian, a symbol of the same segment of the electorate that Obama had trouble reaching during the primary. But even though he provides balance to the ticket, he still reinforces several of Obama's key messages. He was as
prescient on Iraq as
Obama, and I'd really like to see the people who were right about Iraq from the beginning rewarded for their political courage. He's a former Republican (appointed to Reagan's cabinet) and Washington outsider, which dovetails nicely with Obama's message of change and unity.
Beyond that, he's just cool. As a freshman Senator, he passed a veterans' benefits bill that both Bush and McCain opposed and are now trying to
take credit for. When
asked by George Bush how his son (who was fighting in Iraq at the time) was doing, he told the President he wanted his son to come home. Bush, with typical tact, said "“I didn’t ask you that, I asked how he’s doing,” and Webb, like so many of us, was "tempted to slug the commander-in-chief". Another of his
signature issues is the rising economic inequality and disappearance of class mobility in America. He wrote highly acclaimed Vietnam War novels, and Obama/Webb would be the most literary ticket since the ill-fated
Duke/Gifford campaign of 2000. And while Webb is a conservative on some issues, his deviations from the Democratic party line are of the type that would help Obama win. Dude loves himself some guns, to the point that his aide was arrested for carrying Webb's loaded pistol through the senate. I totally understand. If I was a new Democratic Senator in Bush's Washington, I'd be packing heat too - you never know when Dick Cheney's going to "take you on a hunting trip." This scandal would reassure gun-lovers that President Obama won't take their guns away. Webb's also critical of affirmative action. Barack Obama would be smart to embrace a move to a class-based rather than race-based affirmative action, on the grounds that his own kids really don't need any special treatment.
So far, so awesome. What's the problem here? Well, Jim Webb, like all great writers, drew on his most profoundly affecting experiences to forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race. The Republicans are going to destroy him. From the third paragraph of his
1979 article "Why Women Can't Fight":
"I once woke up in the middle of the night to the sounds of one of my machinegunners stabbing an already-dead enemy soldier, emptying his fear and frustrations into the corpse's chest. I watched another of my men, a wholesome Midwest boy, yank the trousers off a dead woman while under fire, just to see if he really remembered what it looked like."
Where to begin? How long after Obama picks Webb as VP that Chris Matthews and Wolf Blitzer are earnestly asking whether Obama supports voyeurist necrophilia? Remember, this is the media that has made an issue of Obama's
bowling score. They would love an excuse to talk about dead naked Vietnamese women for three months. And this is just Webb`s articles. When Karl Rove has wet dreams (what? I already warned you!), he dreams of attack ads based on Webb's novels. For example, from Webb`s 2002
novel:
“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 a little plot of dirt. The man grabbed his young son in his arms, turned him upside down, and put the boy’s penis in his mouth.”
Webb's opponent in his 2006 Senate run tried this same attack, and it ended up backfiring. Webb responded to the attack by
reading a list of his novels blurbs, exposing himself as that most unattractive of people, a writer who has memorized his own clippings. (In the same speech, he also claimed to have written more books than George Bush has read.) Dick Cheney's wife published her own works of lesbian
erotica (there was a clear warning! It was way back in the second sentence of the post!), and got away with it, but she's a Republican, so it was ok. On the other hand, the effectiveness of these attacks may be blunted by the fact that Lost Soldiers was
praised by none other than Vietnam Vet and Arizona Senator John McCain.
However, even if these attacks don't work, there's still the matter of a 1979 article by the name of "Why Women Can`t Fight." It`s a virulent attack on women in the military and specifically women entering the Naval Academy, at one point listing the ratio of men to women in the dorms and calling them a "horny woman's dream". He's concerned both for the male students receiving unfair evaluations from female supervisors, and for the female students who are apparently losing their gender:
"It is a delicate balance for any Academy graduate, looking back on those four years and measuring what he received in return for pouring every last hot ounce of his youth into Annapolis. But part of the price, until now, has never been sexual identity."
Um, ew.
According to women who attended the Naval Academy in the early '80s, the article was used as an excuse to mistreat female students. The politics of selecting Webb are pretty crap, as an anti-feminist would be particularly galling to women disappointed by Hillary's narrow loss. But on the merits, choosing Webb would be even worse. Obama should not choose someone who was on the wrong side of a civil rights struggle. I'll leave you with one more quote, from the novel Something to Die For (and seriously, you were warned. If you choose to keep reading, that's your decision, not mine):
“Fogarty . . . watch[ed] a naked young stripper do the splits over a banana. She stood back up, her face smiling proudly and her round breasts glistening from a spotlight in the dim bar, and left the banana on the bar, cut in four equal sections by the muscles of her vagina.”
Now, Today's Snow Job has no problems with consensual public acts between a woman and a banana. But I have a feeling that the American media will. When Obama spoke out against invading Iraq, he famously said he wasn't opposed to all wars, just to dumb wars. Going to battle with Jim Webb at his side is a dumb war.
