It’s been some time since Sen. Jim Webb faced charges of pornography for various passages in some of his earlier novels … but that doesn’t mean that he’s done settling the score.
In October 2006, George Allen, Webb’s opponent in the Virginia Senate race, issued a press release highlighting sexually charged passages from Webb’s novels and denounced Webb’s “continued pattern of demeaning women.”
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Webb defeated Allen but he revisits the incident — calling them “truly venal character assaults” and a “Karl Rove approach to politics” — in his new book, “A Time To Fight.”
“My opponent’s campaign took short excerpts from several of my novels … pasted them together outside of the narrative that gave them context, and attempted to present my books as pornographic works,” writes Webb. “Another vignette, comprising two sentences, was pulled out of my novel ‘Lost Soldiers,’ making the front page of the Drudge Report, accusing me of being a pedophile.”
Webb says he doesn’t regret what he wrote in his books, including the passages cited by Allen. “Should I have written about it? As a novelist who believes in rendering the world as it is, so that those who have not seen or experience this world can comprehend its realities, absolutely.” He calls Allen’s charges, including additional charges of plagiarism, “absurd, designed purely to create questions in the minds of those who would only see the bald accusation among the fount of news stories that were now accumulating in the final days before the election.”
