The Idiots' Brigade

Kenneth Prager is still the unchallenged Idiot of the Week, but I present the runners-up:

Thanks to TBogg for these choice bits:

From the irrelevant Ann Althouse:

One way to explain his awkward behavior with respect to the presidential receiving line is that he thought through that scene like a novelist. If you were writing a novel about a character like him going through a receiving line with a President like Bush, wouldn't that be exactly the sort of scene you'd want to think up?

Ordinarily, in all sorts of social and political situations, people try to figure out how other people usually act and to stick to the convention and proceed smoothly along. This is nice enough, but rather boring. In a novel, a conventional social situation tends to be a set up for our hero to do something that shakes things up. The ordinary characters are aghast. They condemn the bad behavior of the protaganist, and we readers, in our armchairs, know how right he is. Of course, a novelist who concocts scenes like that is himself utterly conventional.

I don't think Webb has quickly picked up the Washington style. I think he's got the novelist's style, and he's his own hero Senator in a novel about Washington. And, what immense fun this is going to be!

And Althouse is nothing if not conventional. That must be why she's so boring.

And then, there's always self-styled film critic/culture wars jihadist Michael Medved:

In America's ongoing culture war, with ferocious combatants grabbing every available weapon to strike at each other, innocent children and adorable penguins simultaneously qualify as collateral damage. Recent controversies involving environmental and gay-marriage messages in Hollywood cartoons and storybooks for young children show that in our current climate, even the youngest kids and the most endearing denizens of Antarctica can become targets and instruments of powerful propaganda.

I'm not making this up. Believe me -- I've tried.

And of course, the Democrats, for piling on Jim Webb after his exchange with the preznit -- at the behest of George Will, perhaps? (That's the George Will who lied about the encounter in print.) See this comment from Digby:

Here's Will, quoted by Greg Sargent:

Wednesday's Post reported that at a White House reception for newly elected members of Congress, Webb "tried to avoid President Bush," refusing to pass through the reception line or have his picture taken with the president. When Bush asked Webb, whose son is a Marine in Iraq, "How's your boy?" Webb replied, "I'd like to get them [sic] out of Iraq." When the president again asked "How's your boy?" Webb replied, "That's between me and my boy."

Will says the episode demonstrates Webb's "calculated rudeness toward another human being" -- i.e., the President -- who "asked a civil and caring question, as one parent to another."

Here's what was actually said, as confimed by WaPo and Webb:

"How's your boy?" Bush asked, referring to Webb's son, a Marine serving in Iraq.

"I'd like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President," Webb responded, echoing a campaign theme.

"That's not what I asked you," Bush said. "How's your boy?"

"That's between me and my boy, Mr. President," Webb said coldly, ending the conversation on the State Floor of the East Wing of the White House.

According to some sources,. Webb probably should have said more.

And the Democrats are going along with this? Jayzus!