{"id":2444,"date":"2007-07-17T09:53:09","date_gmt":"2007-07-17T16:53:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/2007\/07\/17\/jim-webb-and-the-horse-he-rode-in-on\/"},"modified":"2007-07-17T09:53:09","modified_gmt":"2007-07-17T16:53:09","slug":"jim-webb-and-the-horse-he-rode-in-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/2007\/07\/17\/jim-webb-and-the-horse-he-rode-in-on\/","title":{"rendered":"Jim Webb and the horse he rode in on"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been wondering if I should delete from the subscription bar at my bloglines page the feed for the lewrockwellblogs, nothing wrong with the tedium from its anarcho-libertarian bent &#8212; even if I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;ve pulled anything from it in quite a while, its incessant fandom of Ron Paul has been irking me as a tedium overdone.<\/p>\n<p>Maybe I will, but first I am sidelined by a phrase that one of those people used:<\/p>\n<p><em>Antiwar Conservative Democrat (and former Republican) Sen. Jim Webb<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>The story regards the big hoo-de-hah between Jim Webb and Lindsey Graham over Iraq which has received much attention.\u00c2\u00a0 Lindsey Graham should, by all rights, be one of those 40-60 percentilers that makes the difference between a filibusting Republican Party and some measure or other on Iraq (however pathetically weak a resolution it is that brings us to 60) &#8212; in the distant recesses of my mind, I remember the Washington Monthly magazine calling him the swing voter of that last Republican Congress &#8212; a conservative who bridged some moderate Democratic support.\u00c2\u00a0 Never mind all that, he appears to have entrenched himself on this particular issue &#8212; and now falls safely on the other side of that 40 percent line &#8212; the solid block of Republicans who can be trusted to line up behind Mr. 30 percent approval rating &#8220;William Kristol says that History will Vindicate Him&#8221; President Bush.<br \/>\nJim Webb, meanwhile, has as interesting a pedigree as any Senator, and I noted that a pair of commenters from the Reason Magazine and American Conservative magazine high-fived each other at his election victory for holding up a &#8220;Libertarian&#8221; &#8211; &#8220;Paleo-Conservative&#8221; alliance.\u00c2\u00a0 But tricky beast, that Jim Webb.\u00c2\u00a0 He is, rhetorically, to my left on economic issues &#8212; and I say that noting that he compared our current economic disparity either unfavorably with or a little too one dimensionally with The Gilded Age of the end of the nineteenth century.\u00c2\u00a0 The rhetoric makes me question his continued allegiance to Ronald Reagan &#8212; used prominently in his Senate election bid, but I suppose I will just have to roll with it &#8212; and say that I imagine sometime in the future, the political crosswinds will shift, alliances will change, and he will be &#8220;on the other side&#8221; again.<\/p>\n<p>It is the Kurt Vonnegut quotation again: &#8220;<em>Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.<\/em>&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>But for the moment he isn&#8217;t &#8220;on the other side&#8221;. \u00c2\u00a0 At the moment, he is one of the most dynamic of Democratic Senators, and by all rights the point person for the party on Iraq and National Security.\u00c2\u00a0 I have not gotten a chance to watch the brohauhau with Lindsey Graham &#8212; full of tight-lipped references to their &#8220;friendship&#8221; and brittle and nasty references to each other&#8217;s current state of mind.<\/p>\n<p>Political theater, much needed to keep as aware that the body politic isn&#8217;t stifled in the quest to appease the 40-60 percentiles of the Senate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been wondering if I should delete from the subscription bar at my bloglines page the feed for the lewrockwellblogs, nothing wrong with the tedium from its anarcho-libertarian bent &#8212; even if I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;ve pulled anything from it in quite a while, its incessant fandom of Ron Paul has been irking me as [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2444"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2444\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}