The Center Didn't Hold

[Geee]

American Spectator:

In 2006, Virginia sent an interesting and unlikely Democrat to the U.S. Senate. Jim Webb was a decorated Marine who served as Ronald Reagan's secretary of the navy. He left the administration to oppose defense budget cuts, especially those which threatened the 600-ship Navy Reagan had built. Just six years before winning the Democratic senatorial nomination, Webb had endorsed both George W. Bush and George Allen.

Although Webb opposed the Iraq war, he hated the McGovernites who had taken over his ancestral Democratic Party. "Jane Fonda can kiss my ass," he once told a radio interviewer. "I wouldn't walk across the street to watch her slit her wrist." He wasn't very fond of Bill Clinton either. "Every time I see him salute a Marine," Webb remarked, "it infuriates me." When Clinton left office, Webb gave him this raspberry on the page of the Wall Street Journal op-ed page: "It is a pleasurable experience to watch Bill Clinton finally being judged, even by his own party, for the ethical fraudulence that has characterized his entire political career."

Webb also despised the feminism, collectivism, and political correctness of American liberals. He praised Southern culture as "the greatest inhibitor of the plans of the activist Left and the cultural Marxists for a new kind of society altogether" and the biggest "obstacle to the collectivist taming of America, symbolized by the edicts of political correctness." He described affirmative action as "a permeating state-sponsored racism that is as odious as the Jim Crow laws it sought to countermand."