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.

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.

You’ll forgive me if I don’t think Bush was bragging about being a King David to Uriah (sort of by proxy).

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