Anti-war freshman Sen. Jim Webb, D-VA, has been getting the celebrity treatment ever since he unseated incumbent George Allen last fall. The Dems even tapped him to give their response to President Bush s State of the Union address, a rare honor for a just-elected freshman. A fluff piece naming him one of Politico s Rookies of the Year even mentioned Webb (a former Vietnam veteran and Secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan) as a possible vice presidential contender. Sure, Webb got a few negative headlines when he rudely brushed off the president s inquiry about his son, a Marine serving in Iraq, during a White House visit, and again when a top aide was caught trying to sneak his handgun into a Senate office building, but neither story got much traction. However, the Politico article inconveniently appeared the same day 21 Democrats and Independent Joe Lieberman sided with every Republican senator but one (that would be Gordon Smith, R-OR) and voted 70 to 25 to approve $70 billion for the Iraq war effort -without any withdrawal timetables or other attempts to micromanage the war attached. And surprise, surprise, Jim Webb was one of them. Webb signaled his coming flip-flop on the Dec. 2 Meet the Press show when he told host Tim Russert: There are some Democrats who have said they want to stop funding the war period, and I think that’s just not a winning formula.” For me, he should have added. That should have been big news, at least in Virginia. After all, this rising Democratic star based his entire campaign on his early opposition to the Iraq war and his demands that all the troops be brought home immediately. He even sponsored an amendment requiring that all troops be allowed to stay home as long as they were deployed, a move clearly designed to cripple Gen. David Petraeus surge strategy. At the time, Webb made it clear that he wouldn t let military conditions on the ground change his mind in the least. But political conditions on the ground? Well, that s apparently another story. Don t get me wrong cutting off funding to combat troops in the field is totally inexcusable, so Webb s last-minute capitulation was actually a good thing. But I don t want to hear any more blather about his principled opposition to Bush s war either. Pre-surge, Webb made a big deal about ending the war, and now he s backing away from his own (however wrong and misguided) promises. And when a senator s walk doesn t even come close to matching his talk, he shouldn t be allowed to get away with it.