***bumping back to the top…Webb responds…AUDIO….***

Remember how pathetic it was when the Left tried to make scandals out of books written by Lynne Cheney and Scooter Libby?

Cheney wrote a pulpy novel, “Sisters,” about a frontier woman that included graphic sexual passages and lesbian lovers. (A conservative-bashing site reprinted excerpts here.)

Libby wrote a pulpy novel, “The Apprentice,” a “story of innocence and temptation” set in turn-of-the-century Japan that included graphic sexual passages–including bestiality and a scene in which the brothers of a dead samurai have sex with his daughter.

Both were works of fiction. You know, stuff that’s made up.

Now, the George Allen campaign has detonated its October surprise using the same tactics as Cheney’s and Libby’s critics–attacking the fiction of his Democrat opponent, James Webb via an official “press release” sent to the Drudge Report last night. Are the passages in Webb’s “Lost Soldiers” bizarre and perverted? Yes. 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.

John Hawkins, who first highlighted Webb’s fictional work here and here, does make a good point about media double standards:

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.

Of course, John’s right.

Allah does him one better:

If George Allen had written this book, not only would the left be going berserk, they’d be circulating lists of characters in his other books whom they suspect of being gay.

Heh.

I don’t think, however, that the Allen campaign–couldn’t they leave this to surrogates?–should be trafficking in this late October muck. It is beneath them and there’s plenty else about Webb that is damning.

Like Webb’s lying about leading the “fight” to include an African-American soldier in the Vietnam War soldier’s memorial.

Or his non-fiction writing about women in the military.

And what happened to focusing on Webb’s stance on taxes, as fiscal conservatives in Virginia have been urging?

Political strategists in the Beltway are exulting that “Webb is toast” as a result of this Drudge/Allen bomb. But if this what Republican Senate candidates need to do to win elections, I don’t think any of us should be cheering.

***

Webb is scheduled to appear this morning at 10am on WTOP radio. Should be interesting.

Tom Bevan at RCP:

This race is extremely close right now, and with only eleven days left the story of Webb’s past writings is probably going to put him on the defensive and and chew up valuable time as he tries to explain and/or justify his choice of words. The counter charge that it’s a “smear” by the Allen campaign probably isn’t going to hold much water with the public either, since Webb is being confronted with words written by his own hand.

It’ll be interesting to see how the mainstream media handles this story – if they cover it at all – and how the notoriously prickly Webb responds.

Rick Moran:

Allen may very well have sealed his victory by “outing” Webb’s fictional day dreams but he has lost his soul in the process.

Yes, yes, I know all the excuses my intelligent and worthy commenters are going to give below. It’s in the public domain. It is weird. Allen included a plethora of other quotes showing Webb’s disdain for women in the press release – in a way much more disturbing than the incestuous porn and barely concealed pedophilia. And Webb’s dishonest attacks on Allen’s character deserve to be answered in kind.

But doesn’t this make anyone else’s skin crawl? Both because Webb wrote it and Allen brought it into a political campaign?

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve written many times that politics is a full contact sport and that just about anything is fair game when it comes to the kind of bare knuckled, Pier Street brawl that the Allen-Webb contest has become.

But I also believe that politics is not a zero sum game. 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 piece 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.

If this doesn’t doom any Presidential hopes for the Virginia Senator, it certainly should.

This “outing” does nothing to elevate the debate over Iraq, homeland security, the economy. or any number of other important issues. But then, few campaigns going today are interested in doing so. Perhaps, as in other times in our history, the real issues are so divisive, so painful to discuss that we substitute this kind of excrement and call it politics so that we don’t have to face the hard choices.