"The most miserable, neurotic and obsessive collection of individuals he had ever met."
Ann Althouse
That's a description of the students at Georgetown Law School, attributed to Jim Webb (the Democratic candidate for Senator in Virginia).
It's a good David Brooks column, [$] describing Webb's attitudes:
"He began to see an America riven by a social divide. On the one side were people like himself: tough, independent, hard-working traditionalists who know how to shoot, fight and endure; and on the other side were what he has at various times called the "drug-drenched," "sex-enshrined" narcissists, who cower in their parochial elite enclaves and pass judgment on everybody else.
Webb named his son after Robert E. Lee, and wrote a book, "Born Fighting," which is a full-throated defense of "Rednecks. Trailer-park trash. Racists. Cannon fodder. My ancestors. My people. Me."...
"For the last 50 years," he wrote in "Born Fighting," "the Left has been doing everything in its power to sue them, legislate against their interests, mock them in the media, isolate them as idiosyncratic, and publicly humiliate their traditions. ..."
Jewish culture produces a lot of lawyers, Webb has argued, but Scots-Irish culture produces fighters, and he has spent his life defending the interests and values of these manly, individualistic, brawling populists. He's criticized affirmative action and women in combat. He at one time opposed the Vietnam memorial, which seemed to rebuke the warrior virtues. "Watching the white phallus that is the Washington Monument piercing the air like a bayonet, you feel uplifted," he said. But the "degrading ditch" of the Vietnam memorial seemed to do no such thing."
So why is Webb running as a Democrat?
Can you imagine how the Democrats would rake him over the coals for saying these things if he'd happened to run as a Republican? "Degrading ditch" as the opposite of a phallus? A "white phallus," no less. And you know what color the "degrading ditch" is. I don't have to spell out what they'd be saying about him. "My people"... "racists." Yeeze! And all those "miserable, neurotic" folks at Georgetown...
You might guess he chose to run as a Democrat precisely because if he'd run as a Republican, the Democrats would have destroyed him with material like this. But what's the next step? What happens if he wins? Per Brooks:
"So the Democratic Congressional delegation that convenes next year will be different from the ones we've seen. It will feature ideologically and culturally diverse people who cannot be silenced or reduced to lockstep party loyalists...
[W]e may be about to learn if the party of Nancy Pelosi can make room for the Jim Webbs of the world. We've already learned that the party of George Bush and Tom DeLay did a terrible job making room for its own mavericks and moderates."
I can already hear the true-blue Democratic bloggers yelling: No fair! You see that we're about to win so you're staking your claim to our victory.
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