Jim Webb

As I watched news coverage of the speeches on security given by President Obama and former Vice President Dick Cheney yesterday, it occurred to me that by giving in to the left's assertion that waterboarding is torture, we again dilute the meaning of a powerful word, and withdraw it from future important debates.

The first time this thought crossed my mind was during the George Allen/Jim Webb senate campaign. George Allen, pointing to a Jim Webb campaign worker that had been assigned to follow the Allen campaign, said  "This fellow here over here with the yellow shirt, Macaca, or whatever his name is. He's with my opponent... Let's give a welcome to Macaca, here. Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia."

The Webb campaign claimed that "Macaca" was a racial slur. The press immediately began to investigate and found that the word was indeed a racial slur. Used by francophone colonists in the Belgian Congo.(I'm not making this up). To refer to black natives. So, George Allen was a RACIST!!!! He used a racial sliur against one of his opponents' campaign workers.

The Webb campaign made the charge stick. George Allen had uttered a racial slur used by francophone colonists in the Belgian Congo against an American of Indian decent.

I thought then that people who had experienced real racism (and there is plenty of it in the U.S.) must have felt somewhat used. The Webb campaign had taken a legitimate and painful experience and cheapened it for political gain. They were equating what was obviously a nonsensical word that Allen had come up with on the spur of the moment, to other words too horrible to mention.

What the Webb campaign did was cheapen the word "racism". They used it to benefit themselves and in so doing took a little bit of the punch out of the word that describes suffering and injustice.

I have had the same thought during the "torture" debate recently. Most of us do not think of torture as being administered with a doctor standing by with a stopwatch and an instruction manual that tells them how far they can legally go. Again, a word has been cheapened for political gain. I heard Anderson Cooper make the case last night that North Korea, the Khmer Rouge, and North Korea had used the same torture methods  asthe United States. This is an obscenity, and I for one am sick of having the left usurp the language for their own benefit.

The unintended consequence is that they dilute the meaning of important words, and with them important issues and events.

This media clown show over comments about John McCain's military sevice by Wes Clark and JIm Webb has really gotten out of hand.  They didn't attack McCain's military service, they attacked the relevance of that service.  The relevant questions - e.g., the relevance of military service to Presidential candidates, the 180 these guys are making on that issue - are being ignored.  The media should be smart enough not to fall for the manufactured controversy they're currently covering.  Instead, reporters should be asking Wes Clark and Jim Webb when they suddenly decided that military service wasn't such a big deal and shouldn't be mentioned.  I addressed Gen. Clark's previous comments yesterday; Ramesh Ponnuru patiently explained the appropriate take on the Clark story today.

Now let's examine whether Jim Webb really believes that McCain needs to "get the politics out of the military [and] have our political arguments in other areas."   Here's a review of Webb's own record.

• In his own 2006 Senate campaign, Jim Webb touted the importance of military experience...
  

  [W]hat you’re seeing here is, is a split between the theorists, who have controlled so much of the policy in this administration, theorists who have never been on a battlefield, who have never put a uniform on, and who are looking at this thing in a totally different way from people who have had to, to worry about their troops and themselves possibly coming under enemy hands.

•  And again...
  

  “I know what it’s like to be on the ground. I know what it’s like to fight a war like this..."

•  In 2004, Jim Webb criticized "those around Bush, many of whom came of age during Vietnam and almost none of whom served..."
•  In 2000, during McCain's Presidential campaign, Jim Webb wrote an article about John McCain's military service and its relevance in the campaign.
• In 1998, Jim Webb gave a speech in which he questioned the "new notion: that military service during time of war is not a pre-requisite for moral authority..."   He disagreed, calling lack of military service a "problem".
  

  I ... subscribe to a different view, in effect the reverse of that syllogism, because when it comes to leadership ... the logic is indeed the reverse: the hotter the fire, the tougher the steel, and the more reliable the leader. It has also created a vacuum of true understanding in the highest places. Today, for the first time since the United States became a major world power, none of the principals in the national security arena .. have served in the military. This problem might recede ... but it is unlikely to go away.

The media should not be trying to read "smears" into what Clark and Webb said.   Instead, they should be asking why they have suddenly reached these politically convenient new conclusions.

Sen. Jim Webb's GI Bill Amendment poses these three concerns:

1) It defers costs to future Congresses, and increases benefits without increasing pay.
2) It hurts retention by encouraging troops to leave military service.
3) It lacks modernization funding for the military.

How big a policy issue will this be between McCain and Obama in their debates?  Look at the list of organizations that are allegedly supporting Webb's bill:

• Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America
• The Veterans of Foreign Wars
• The American Legion
• The Military Officers' Association of America
• Vietnam Veterans of America
• AMVETS
• The Air Force Sergeants Association
• The Enlisted Association of the National Guard of the United States
• The Student Veterans of America
• Disabled American Veterans
• The American Association of Community Colleges
• The National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges
• The Partnership for Veterans' Education
• The American Council on Education
• Association of Independent Colleges and Universities

And compare these All-American red-blooded institutions (using that term loosely in regard to colleges and universities, of course) to the evil, Machiavellian entities allegedly opposing it:

• The Heritage Foundation
• Senator McCain
• President Bush
• [Sic] "About half the Republican Party"

After you watch:

Then check out the opposition in TPM's 5/12 article Obama Hits McCain for Failing to Support Webb's GI Bill. 

Democrat Talking Points:  While most everyone, especially Presumptive President Obama, "respect John McCain's service to his country," McCain basically lost his marbles in Vietnam, abandoned (fill in the blank) numbers of POW's/MIA's to their fate, and continues to throw Iraq and Afghanistan vets under the bus with his refusal to back the modernization of veterans' benefits put forth by the patriot and Vietnam vet of sound mind and policy, Jim Webb. 

Republican Talking Points: (getting far less air and blog time, and certainly not playing to the crowd) Webb has crafted a diabolically brilliant Trojan Horse strategy to help elect Democrats, undemine military retention rates, impede the development of a professional military class, keep active duty military personnel down as a miserably low-paid underclass, prevent funding for active duty personnel to achieve a safer, more modernized military and plant a financial time bomb for average Americans (including vets) to pay for it all in the future, long after President Obama and his Democratic Majority minions are elected. 

Marketing is everything.  Is it not? 

Speculation is swirling around Jim Webb as a potential Vice Presidential candidate.  Others have already covered many of the problems with this scenario...

• Webb and Obama have some fairly non-trivial policy differences
• Webb isn't very good on the trail and resists some of the necessities of campaigning
• Webb seems to dislike subordinate positions where he cannot focus on and advance his own agenda

Any, perhaps even all, of those could be routed around, though.  But there is another problem: Jim Webb would completely trip up the Democrat's spin on John McCain.

In a 2000 New York Times article about John McCain - entitled "No Ordinary War; No Ordinary Hero" - Jim Webb spoke of McCain's "broad appeal" and said "McCain can appeal to all sides".  Excerpting...

Even though Vietnam was a divisive war that is not yet resolved in the national consciousness, Mr. McCain can appeal to all sides. He is an inspiration to many veterans and conservatives [...] At the same time, many who opposed the war can nonetheless support the man because of his personal ordeal ...

This broad appeal is unique, especially because it is based on suffering rather than concrete battlefield accomplishments. [...] But a closer look brings deeper insight into why most Americans have come to hold this defining experience in such great esteem.  [...]

But if there is insight into Mr. McCain's leadership style, it is with the question of how he worked to normalize relations with Vietnam. To his credit, the man who is so often criticized by opponents for divisiveness succeeded in working across the widest imaginable spectrum of interests in order to bring the Vietnam War and its aftermath to a full resolution. At the same time, as in his dealings with other issues, like campaign finance reform, his relentless pursuit of a solution to the normalization question and the singularity of his approach left a trail of bruised egos and avowed revenge seekers. [...]

And he created a perception in some circles that he would reach over allies to work with enemies by allying himself to Senator John Kerry, who once headed Vietnam Veterans Against the War, as well as providing political cover for President Clinton when normalization was announced.

In fact, these actions may be one reason for the rather surprising statistic that shows George W. Bush running as well among veterans as Mr. McCain himself. But the fact is, Mr. McCain succeeded, and he took the country with him. Yes, he used his prisoner of war credentials to their full impact. Certainly he could have been smarter and more respectful of the travails of others, and more conscious of buttressing his supporters as he reached out to his adversaries. But he took on the most contentious diplomatic issue of our time and pursued it to a satisfactory conclusion.

Resolving this issue may not show John McCain's ability to unite disparate groups, but it is certainly testimony to his ability to lead.

The problem is not that Webb liked McCain once and then changed his mind; the problem is that Jim Webb has made arguments that directly contradict the story the Left is trying to tell about John McCain.  They don't want to spend the next few months trying to unspin themselves on this.