VA senate seat: Looks like Webb is toast to me

Is this a dirty trick ?

Should a candidate be responsible for the content of a novel he wrote many years ago?

I guess they should, but it’s… a novel. The hysteria is certainly at a fever pitch given that people are saying that scenes in a novel where no one is supposed to be angels is worse than ACTUAL behavior of Mark Foley.
http://masonconservative.typepad.com/the_mason_conservative/2006/10/drudge_allens_r.html

So, I dunno: should a candidate be responsible for the long long history of racial slurs that George Allen has, especially given that he’s refused to acknowledge, much less apologize for them? If George Allen is re-elected, Virginia is going to have some racial egg on its face for a long time, especially if Allen indeed tries to run for President.

I think it’s pretty stupid. Novelists write characters who do things that don’t neccesarily represent the author’s morality, or have views that don’t neccesarily represent the author’s views. In one of his last roles (The Killers), Ronald Reagan played a crime boss who orders a hit. Should Reagan have not been elected because he was a murderous crime boss?

Does anyone believe that Arnold Schwarzenegger shouldn’t have been elected governor because he is a cyborg from the future sent to kill Sarah Connor?

VA, enjoy your bigot Senator for another 6 years. Why didn’t you elect Oliver North when you could?

I’m sure the riposte will be fully equal.

Allen’s going to win, no doubt, because the coalition of the well-to-do-fuck-you’s and the downstate mouthbreathers is greater than the urban/suburban coalition of please-don’t-let-the-racist-win folks. Allen is a mealy-mouthed fuckwit and we’re going to be stuck with his worthless sack of flesh for another six years, but there’s no way that ass is ever going to be president, and for that, I’m grateful.

Certainly the quality of debate in this thread is …er… well, it’s something, all right.

To address the OP, which did raise an excellent and debatable point:

Yes, a candidate should be “responsible” for the content of a novel he wrote. But from that statement does not automatically follow that Webb is a bad guy for the content we’re seeing here. Fiction is not real; it’s designed to tell a story. It’s unclear to me from the brief excerpts quoted what the overall tone of the novel was. I think a father that sexually abuses his young son is terrible, and frankly I think a novel which showed such an act in a positive light, without negative consequenes of some kind, is suspect.

But a novel can graphically describe acts that it ultimately condemns. I have no idea what happened to the fictional father in “Lost Soldiers,” but I have a funny feeling it wasn’t a story that cast him and his circumstances in a uniformly positive light. If that’s correct, then I cannot see why we’d criticize Webb, except perhaps on his literary skills.

Would that the shrill crowd attacking Allen also viewed these character attacks with such dispassionate analysis. Neither Allen nor Webb deserves credit for running a clean campaign; neither Allen nor Webb deserves a tenth of the mud that their opponents have slung. I have no trouble separating the mud from the substantive issues supported by each candidate. I wonder why others in this thread can do so for Webb, but not for Allen?

This seems to me to be an exceptional example of false equivalence. As you rightly note, an author may very well write about bad things happening that he ultimately condemns. It’s hard to conceive of a book in which the protagonist does not face challenges, and sometimes they involve crimes. I don’t think Tom Clancy actually supports the nuclear obliteration of a sports facility, for example.

But if the issue is a foolish charge about a book written by Webb and charges of racism against Allen (who was clearly seen on tape calling someone “macaca”), why do you feel Allen deserves the same treatment as Webb?

I agree with this Kos diarist that Webb could turn this into a positive by saying that while he doesn’t condone the acts he describes, they are acts that he actually saw while he was in the hellhole of Vietnam. Since he was, you know, in Vietnam. Fighting the war. Unlike SOME candidates he could mention.

Partly in my case, admittedly, it’s because I’m a partisan Democrat, and am going to be more likely to defend a Democratic candidate. More than that, though, it’s because I don’t neccesarly agree that the things in the mud aren’t substantive issues. Obviously, in some cases, like the case of what Webb might write in his novels, they’re not.

However, some of the accusations in this race go beyond that. Allen’s racism, Webb’s sexism, these raise the question of what sort of people these are, and whether I want people who hold racist or sexist views representing me.

It’s pretty clear that in their past, both George Allen and Jim Webb have made statements and held positions that are pretty reprehensible. As a young man, it looks like Allen did make negative racial comments and had racist views about blacks. Likewise, in 1979, Webb wrote an article in which he made some pretty sexist and insulting comments about women and their unsuitabily to be in the military.

Of course, that both these men had these respective attitudes 25-30 years ago doesn’t say anything about their views now, and I don’t want to condemn someone now for a mistake in his past. However, more recent actions by Senator Allen, like his photop with Council of Conservative Citizens leaders and his calling an Indian man by the racial slur “macaca”, makes me wonder if he really has abandoned those racist views. In James Webb’s case, on the other hand, he does appear to have changed his views.

So, I think the fact that it looks like Senator Allen might be a racist is a pretty good reason not to vote for him.

Because until this ridiculous example came along, you could have quizzed 10,000 Virginians about whther “macaca” was even an insult, much less one with racial conotations, and gotten a statistically insignificant number of positive responses. I believe Allen when he denies that the word was meant as a racist remark, and if the situation involved a Democrat, I would believe him too. The difference, I feel, is that then, so would you.

If Shakespeare or Dickens were running for Senate as Democrats, I imagie Sludge would blast them for promoting underage sex as well. Of course, whether the people of Virginia care remains to be seen.

I should say so. We absolutely need to hold Webb to the fire over this tragedy. Webb wrote 50% of this excerpt in a passive tone. He used at least one adverb, one dangling participle, and two metaphors of dubious value. I had a difficult time finishing even this one simple paragraph and can’t imagine wanting to read the entire story. But if Webb wrote it he should be responsible for every grammatical mistake contained within it. As he’s a candidate for public office, we should accept nothing less.

Sure, but you’re taking the wrong sample. If you take 10,000 kids of white Franco-Tunisian immigrants, how many will know it’s a racial insult? George Allen, because his mom was white Tunisian, is going to be more likely to know a racial slur that’s used by white Tunisians than your average Virginian would.

It doesn’t matter a bit who in Virginia heard the word “macaca” before. General ignorance of the word was probably why he felt he could use it. Most people probably wouldn’t know what I meant if I accused them of engaging in urolagnia. Doesn’t change what I mean when I use it, or how offended people would be when they learned what it meant.

Your prediction of what I would believe is simply the projection of your own partisan excuses for Allen, and not on reality. The fact that you would engage in such specious argumentation (really, the ignorance of the word) suggests that you are motivated to do some serious stretching and reaching on behalf of Allen.

I’m sure that Allen’s slurs were proven beyond any doubt that may have existed among the vast majority of the GD wing of the SDMB, so let’s not go there.

Was there any truth to the allegations (I’ll find them if I have to) that Webb used to cruise around black neighborhoods and point guns at the inhabitants?

Come now, you know better than to think that argumentum ad populum is valid or relevant. By this reasoning, the Washington D.C. official who got caught in a flap for using the word “niggardly” a few years back was guilty of racism, because if you’d asked 10,000 people about the word a few days earlier you would have gotten quite a few who thought that it was in fact a racial insult.

When even Michelle Malkin thinks your attack on a Democrat is pathetic, it’s time to move on.

Good try but I think her point was he could be beaten on the issues and they didn’t need to do what the left has done to others re their fictional writing.

How’d you like her point about the “media double standard” !

By the logic in the OP, Scooter Libby should have been imprisoned for aiding, abetting, and endorsing the bestial rape of an underaged girl by a bear for prostitution training. :rolleyes: