Webb 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 — one who, disregarding many hard things Webb had said about him during the campaign, asked a civil and caring question, as one parent to another. When — if ever — Webb grows weary of admiring his new grandeur as a “leader” who carefully calibrates the “symbolic things” he does to convey messages, he might consider this: In a republic, people decline to be led by leaders who are insufferably full of themselves. ~George Will
As Will sees it, Bush was right to bristle. You don’t have any right to talk to the president like that, even if his near-criminal unseriousness may end up getting your son killed. It’s “patent disrespect for the presidency.”
Well, this country could do with more “patent disrespect for the presidency.” It might help keep our presidents tethered to reality. ~Gene Healy
Senator-elect Jim Webb has continued to get himself into trouble with the Republican punditocracy. Supposedly, he was rude to the President! To recap: Bush sought him out and asked him what strikes me not as a “civil and caring” question, but a deliberate poke in the eye: “How’s your boy?” Knowing, as he certainly did, that Webb’s son was in Iraq (since wearing his son’s combat boots was a major symbolic part of Sen. Webb’s entire campaign), the appropriate response might have been, “He’s very well, Mr. President, no thanks to you.” Instead, Sen. Webb apparently took a different tack and refused to be baited into saying something like that. According to The Hill, he said that he wanted to see his son brought back from Iraq. As Mr. Healy noted, a “civil and caring parent” would have understood that. Perhaps then he might have asked after Webb’s son.
However, unlike a “civil and caring parent,” as an autocrat, who felt like using Sen. Webb’s son as his icebreaker, he wanted a response to the question he asked and nothing else. This convinces me that Mr. Bush was not “civil and caring” and was not interested in how Webb’s “boy” was doing (Sen. Webb might also have retorted, fairly enough, “my son is a man, Mr. President, and more of one that you will ever be”), but was concerned with making a show of his allegedly deep and unfathomable compassion. My guess is that Sen. Webb, who is evidently not the smoothest Washington operator (which is why people out here in the country like him), wasn’t going to play at the autocrat’s parlour games and decided to use this opening to make a substantive point about policy. Imagine that: policy (one that is close to his heart, obviously), not chit-chat, was Webb’s priority. While Americans are continuing to die in Iraq, who is demonstrating the greater concern for all of the soldiers in Iraq and being less full of himself? Mr. Bush, who will apparently never countenance withdrawal or serious change of policy on his watch, or Sen. Webb, whose first thought and first response was not only for ”his boy,” but for all of the soldiers in Iraq whom Mr. Bush placed in harm’s way?
My favourite bit is where George Will invokes the Republic in Bush’s defense. This is like calling Anne Boleyn (d. 1536) as a character witness for Henry VIII in 1537. Typically, the autocrat’s lackeys in the press are simply shocked and outraged that anyone would dare to speak to the master in this fashion. In a republic, the people decline to prostrate themselves before an autocrat, and they decline to be his servants. In the Old Republic, they did away with as much of the pomp and courtliness of European monarchy as they could. If we really were still in a republic, Webb’s son would never have been sent to Iraq, because no one would have allowed the autocrat to start an illegal war of his own will. A little less deference to the master and a little more interest in the welfare of our soldiers seems to be very much in order. That quite a few people have a hard time with those priorities explains how we wound up in this predicament in the first place.
Clark Stooksbury and Dan McCarthy have more.
5 comments
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November 30th, 2006 at 5:48 pm
Pithlord
Well said.
November 30th, 2006 at 5:53 pm
James Kabala
I agree with those who have said that if Webb really hates the President that much, why did he attend the function in the first place? Didn’t he know the President would be there? Doesn’t tradition require that one be polite to one’s host? If the President is a mainstream American politician, he deserves the basic courtesy one would show to any other normal, well-meaning American; if he is a contemptible monster such as you and Webb believe him to be, then one shouldn’t attend functions he sponsors and eat his cheese and crackers anymore than one would attend a party thrown by Hitler or Stalin or Sadaam Hussein.
Opposing this stupid war is admirable; loving your son is admirable; serving honorably in Vietnam yourself is admirable; even despising Bush increasingly seems admirable; making a public scene in order to win favorable media coverage and pump your own feelings of moral superiority when you could have avoided the presidential embrace more easily by staying home is not admirable.
A lot of what James Bowman has written on the connection between this war and his pet subject of honor has been misguided, as I myself once wrote to you when he wrote a dumb column about honor and Lieberman/Lamont, and even some of this column is over the top (is party switching always dishonorable? I think not), but I agree with a lot of it.
http://www.jamesbowman.net/diaryDetail.asp?hpID=146
November 30th, 2006 at 11:53 pm
gabriel
And Bush flays puppies in his spare time, before treading on the prize Dahlias of grey-haired, cookie-baking Grandmothers while out jogging.
You’ll forgive me if I don’t think Bush was bragging about being a King David to Uriah (sort of by proxy).
December 1st, 2006 at 9:54 am
Roach
This seems like an alpha-male pissing contest. I like Webb’s style, but the I’m-just-an-old-redneck-who-can’t-be-tamed routine is wearing kind of thin. You should be polite to your host. You should avoid social conflict, particularly when family is involved. I think his invocation of his son at every opportunity is just as obnoxious as Sheehan’s. His son is a free man who volunteered to fight in the Marines. While their service is a public trust and they are not mere mercenaries, they are all volunteers and this “my child, my child” breathlessness is a sign of our culture’s increasingly sick feminization.
Webb was a little uncouth. Bush was unnecessarily confrontational and rude. Neither of them really did much to make themselves look good. But I agree that Will’s “dignity of the office” routine is kind of un-American in its own way. Bush is not Webb or any other civilian’s “Commander in Chief.” Further, Will omitted the “that’s not what I asked” bit, so Will is being postively dishonest best I can tell.
December 1st, 2006 at 1:29 pm
Daniel Larison
I agree, Chris, that it was something of a pissing contest and I agree that you should be polite to your host. I agree with James that it might have been better if Webb had not gone, but I would note that if he had refused to go even more people would be calling Webb “childish” or “immature” for refusing even to attend the function. But it is doubly poor for the host to be anything but hospitable and accommodating. On a scale of poor form from one to ten, Bush was a seven and Webb maybe a four. No one’s winning any etiquette prizes, I grant you, but it is always the host’s responsibility to accommodate and paper over any differences or disagreements so that your guest feels at ease. Maybe Webb is a naturally ornery guy who doesn’t like these meet-and-greets (I like him better already), in which case he really went into the wrong line of work, but if you’re the host and you have an ornery, uncomfortable guest the last thing you should do is push the one button that you probably know will set him off.
On the question of honour, it could be the case that Webb regards Bush as such a fundamentally dishonourable man that he does not feel obliged to show him the sort of respect Bush’s supporters believe was due to him. Possessing honour in the eyes of others is essential to obtaining their respect. A man who has brought dishonour on himself, as I’m sure Webb thinks Bush has, does not receive the same treatment. That is the very old-fashioned way. Maybe that has nothing to do with why Webb responded as he did, but if we want to talk about understandings of honour and social behaviour that is something worth bearing in mind.
However, as I suggested over at Clark’s blog, there is an argument to be made that some folks consider their children’s well-being the business of family and friends and not the business of just every person who asks after them. Maybe that seems unfriendly and anti-social, and maybe it is in a way, but maybe it really was none of Bush’s business to ask that question. When Webb was saying “that’s between me and my boy,” if the reports are correct, he wasn’t even necessarily trying to show disrespect to Bush; he was stating what probably seemed to him to be obvious: “it’s none of your business!”
Bowman is wrong about one thing. Webb has never “made such a public fuss” about his military record. He does not talk about it in public all that often, and he certainly never engages in Kerryesque “reporting for duty” idiocy. He does speak with conviction on the duty of soldiers because he understands it on a personal level, but I have never come across an episode in the last year’s campaign where he used his veteran status to belittle or intimidate anyone else. On that score, Webb does have class and represents veterans very well. If he pointed out that Allen didn’t go to Vietnam and regarded that as a moral failure, well, he takes the same view that a lot of veterans had about Clinton for skipping out on the draft. I don’t believe that he constantly invokes his son at every turn. He did wear his son’s combat boots during the campaign for symbolic effect, but mentions of his son do not, so far as I know, frequently come up in his public remarks. I would be shocked if they did.
Bowman’s whining about Webb being a “turncoat” is rather pathetic. By the same standard, Ronald Reagan was and Rudy Giuliani is a treacherous traitor who only achieved his respective place because he turned against his friends and colleagues in his old party. What a joke. Most of Southern white men have become such “turncoats” when their old party no longer represented them. The same could be said for a number of people in the GOP today. As if parties that routinely betray their constituents deserve undying loyalty! As if loyalty to the GOP were the measure of honour!
I don’t buy the view that Webb is given over to the therapeutic culture and the quest for authenticity. Surely one of the knocks on Webb for the entire campaign was that he was terrible at conveying much emotion at all, authentic or inauthentic. Except when Allen started bashing his books for supposedly being pornographic, which clearly did bother Webb because the charges were so outrageous, I never saw nor heard about Webb expressing much emotion at all. My grandfather was from Scots-Irish stock, and he was much the same way.
The idea that this episode reveals that Webb doesn’t understand the “traditional honor culture” is pretty far out there. Maybe he doesn’t understand that culture (I would bet he knows more about it than a lot of other folks), but this isn’t proof of it. Bowman invokes “traditional honor culture” but never defines what he thinks it is or, in fact, how Webb’s little tussle with the President shows that he lacks a sense of honour. An opportunist who wanted to blow this up into a big controversy would keep feeding the story. A man who was genuinely offended but who does have a sense of honour, as I think Webb has, will let the public controversy sputter and die. One thing’s for sure–if you say something against a Scots-Irishman’s honour, you had better be prepared to fight in one way or another.
This entire episode reminds me of the mini-controversy over at the ACU a year or two ago when it was reported, apparently falsely, that Don Devine had refused to shake hands with Mr. Bush and remained seated during a standing ovation after the his speech. The charges were apparently entirely untrue, as Devine strongly insisted soon thereafter, but simply upon hearing the charges David Keane not only declared Devine to be a rude jerk but also decided that Devine was no longer his friend. Even if Devine had done the things he was accused of, this response was insane. In fact, he had not, but I don’t think I ever saw Keane offer a public retraction of his wacky statement.
What astonishes me about the anti-Webb responses to the Webb-Bush episode is the presumption that Mr. Bush, who is as “full of himself” as any President in my lifetime, deserves nothing but deference in all things. It seems to me that this instinct of automatic, excessive deference is one of the chief reasons why so many people went along with the war in Iraq. Follow the President’s lead, they said. Trust the President, they said. Yield to the President, they said. Maybe it was high time that someone stopped yielding and bowing and scraping. Maybe it was time to break some of the court rules of the imperial presidency.