Did Webb disrespect president?
Absent what TV football announcers call “incontrovertible video evidence” of what took place between President Bush and Sen.-elect James Webb, D-Va., during their recent dust-up, it’s hard to know quite what to think. As reported by The Washington Post, the president asked Webb at a White House reception about his son, a Marine serving in Iraq. Webb, who’d bitterly criticized Bush’s war policies during his campaign, refused to make nice.
“I’d like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President,” Webb said.
“That’s not what I asked you,” Bush replied. “How’s your boy?”
“That’s between me and my boy, Mr. President,” Webb answered.
A decorated Vietnam veteran and best-selling novelist, Webb says he was tempted to take a punch at Bush, thereby endearing himself to those who see the president as an insolent punk. Less amused was the Post’s persnickety columnist George Will.
“Webb,” he wrote “certainly has conveyed what he is: a boor. Never mind the patent disrespect for the presidency. Webb’s more gross offense was calculated rudeness toward another human being … (who) asked a civil and caring question, as one parent to another.”
Never mind, too, Bush’s haughty demand that Webb answer him like a servant or a royal subject, which Will evidently thought reflected badly on the president, because he discreetly omitted it from his account. Others have noted that the very proper Will previously failed to object when Deadeye Dick Cheney told Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., to go bleep himself on the Senate floor.
The nation’s capital is chock full of etiquette experts, many of whom mistook George W. Bush for a tough guy, and treated invading Iraq like a Boy Scout jamboree. It’s the Washington disease: fantasies of omnipotence indulged by persons who themselves put nothing at risk, and who never have, people who confuse talking with doing.
To them, a guy like Webb’s a barbarian, albeit a barbarian with real political skills. Campaigning in his son’s combat boots while simultaneously earning credit from pundits for not trading on the young man’s service was definitely cute.
Nor does a combat record necessarily confer wisdom. Consider Sen. John McCain, another Vietnam veteran currently courting right-wing Republican voters by proposing to increase combat troops in Iraq — troops that happen not to exist in service of an undefined cause that’s already lost.
Looking back, it’s amazing to contemplate the sheer unreality of the political discussion leading up to America’s first “pre-emptive” war. The Post’s Walter Pincus, whose excellent reporting casting doubt upon Iraq’s imaginary WMDs got buried on page A23 back then, recently wrote an interesting piece looking at what some of the 126 House Democrats who voted against Bush’s war were saying at the time.
Some were amazingly prescient. Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., the incoming Armed Services Committee chairman, wrote that he had “no doubt that our military would decisively defeat Iraq’s forces and remove Saddam. But like the proverbial dog chasing the car down the road, we must consider what we would do after we caught it.” Skelton warned that Iraq’s history of dictatorship and nasty ethnic tensions might cause a U.S.-imposed regime to “be rejected by the Iraqi people, leading to civil unrest and even anarchy.”
None of these misgivings, Pincus noted, were reported in The Washington Post. The White House ignored them. Meanwhile, pundits lionized Bush as “our young warrior king” (MSNBC’s Chris Matthews). Newsweek’s Howard Fineman discerned in him “a model of unblinking, eyes-on-the-prize decisiveness.?
They’re sure not talking that way now.
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Gene Lyons is a national magazine award winner and co-author of “The Hunting of the President” (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). You can e-mail Lyons at [email protected].