DIRTY PASSAGES IN JIM WEBB’S NOVELS: Not that big a deal to me — they’re novels — but I suppose the Foley business has given this sort of thing more resonance than it would otherwise have. That sort of blowback doesn’t seem all that unfair, though it’s just another indicator of how lame the Webb/Allen race has been ever since Macacagate.

UPDATE: Tom Bevan: “Given that Drudge is currently splashing the details of some bizarre, sexually explicit passages from Jim Webb’s books on his site, the first line of this big profile of Webb in today’s Washington Post is timely, but probably not helpful: ‘James Webb will tell you that he is first a writer, with several best-selling novels to his name.’ Oy. . . . It’ll be interesting to see how the mainstream media handles this story – if they cover it at all – and how the notoriously prickly Webb responds.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Surprisingly, Imus doesn’t like Webb’s writing.

MORE: Radley Balko thinks this whole story is unfair to Webb:

This is nothing like Foley. I agree that the Foley attacks were blown out of proportion. But it’s also clear that Foley was a sexual predator. Jim Webb was writing about a remote, foreign culture. The two aren’t remotely comparable. Nor is it legitimate to say there’s some sort of “unseemliness equivalence” between chastising the GOP for Foley, and implying that Webb is a pervert because of passages from his books.

The scene everyone’s up in arms about isn’t remotely titillating or sexual. It depicts two Americans in an exotic and foreign locale. The penis-kissing incident involves a native man and his son in a remote, rural part of South Asia. It’s clearly scene-painting, and both characters are shocked and troubled by it, and return to it later in the book.

The genital-kissing custom, by the way, is fairly common in many parts of the world, including Southeast Asia. It isn’t sexual. Yes, it seems odd to Americans (there have been several cases where Asian
adults in America have been prosecuted for it — none have been upheld, with courts clearly finding the practice customary, not sexual) — and it seems clear from the book that Webb thinks it’s odd, too. It isn’t as if he made it up as part of some latent perversion.

It’s entirely likely that Webb saw this happen while he was in Vietnam, was struck by it, and is relaying what he saw in the book.

I wasn’t suggesting that Webb is some sort of pervert — as I said, it’s a novel — but only that this would be likely to play badly. I like Webb, and my earlier impression of Allen as a bit of a dim bulb has been amply borne out by this campaign. Nonetheless, when you get down in the mud, as the Webb campaign has certainly done, you get dirty too. And if Imus thinks it’s bad, then it’s likely to hurt him.

MORE: Reader Brian Wiegand emails:

Radley Balko is mostly right. I interviewed Jim Webb this morning and he said that he saw the genital kissing while he was in Thailand, not Vietnam. As Balko says,it was not at all a sexual act. This story is being grossly misrepresented, much like the story about the noose that used to be in George Allen’s law office was. What was that you were saying about getting down in the mud?

Indeed.