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The Hypocrisy of Webb

By Philip Klein on 7.2.08 @ 11:08AM

Jim Webb is the latest Democrat to take aim at John McCain, but his comments show perhaps an higher degree of chutzpah than Wesley Clark's:

Mr. Webb, a Virginia Democrat who is often mentioned as a possible running mate for Mr. Obama, said Mr. McCain should "calm down" about his military record. "Don't be standing up and uttering your political views and implying that all the people in the military support them, because they don't," he said on MSNBC.

A Marine who served in Vietnam -- a fact he mentioned often as he campaigned for the Senate, occasionally while wearing his son's desert combat boots -- Mr. Webb said "we need to make sure that we take politics out of service."

It's pretty clear that Webb owes his Senate seat to the fact that he used his military service, as well as his son's service in Iraq, to give added credence to his anti-war views. Here is Webb in a debate with George Allen on Meet the Press on Sept. 17, 2006:

I know what it's like to be on the ground. I know what it's like to fight a war like this. And there's -- there are limits to what the military can do. Eventually, this is going to have to move into a diplomatic environment. Now, that's where this administration seems to have blinders. They're not talking to Syria, they're not talking to Iran. And there are ways that we can do this, move this forward....

One of the, one of the great problems we have right now in, in, in discussing this war is that very few people who have brought us this war have served and very, very few of the children of these people who have brought us this war have served. And if you have to wake up every morning wondering about a loved one, you will look at, at words like this much differently.

I've never heard McCain argue that Obama opposes the war because he doesn't know what it's like to be on the ground. And McCain did have a son serving in Iraq, but, unlike Webb, only talked about it on the rare occasion when somebody else brought it up, and certainly never used it to bolster his arguments on Iraq.

The only person who needs to calm down here is Jim Webb.

topics:
John McCain, Environment, Military, Iraq, Iran