Plum Crazy

Unable to tell the difference between fictional characters and real teenagers.

Allah and Patterico actually get it almost right.

Patterico:

The latest big bombshell in the Webb-Allen race is that Webb wrote a novel containing a scene that depicts a man performing oral sex on a young boy.

Let's stipulate that such practices are illegal and disgusting. However, this is a novel. All sorts of odd things happen in novels. Creative people need freedom to let their imaginations run wild without having people assuming that every fictional scene is an expression of their internal desires.

Allah:

It's an odd little vignette, to be sure, but the other characters seem as mystified by it as the reader is. The story's about Vietnam; maybe he's describing some obscure cultural practice that he encountered there. Or, just maybe, he made it up. Have we actually reached the point where Senate seats now turn on the sex scandals of fictional characters?

But then Allah drags up something totally irrelevant and Patterico agrees:

If George Allen had written this book, not only would the left be going berserk, they'd be circulating lists of characters in his other books whom they suspect of being gay.

However, a commenter at Patterico and another blogger Allah links to seemingly can't tell the difference between a character in a novel and real Congressional pages.

Blogger Allah links to:

Its not a major scandal, by any stretch, since it doesn't appear as though he acted on any of the impulses that he wrote about in his novel, but if a few vulgar IMs can send the media into a major fit for nearly two weeks, and a stint at the Playboy party can become a running gag on The Daily Show, this deserves at least a lookover in a campaign commerical and a few "rescue" interviews, or at least some sort of new adjective attached to Jim Webb's name when he's mentioned on nighttime political stew shows, something right in the middle of a Foley and Ford, Jr.

Commenter at Patterico:

At such a critical point in our history for the campaign to be centered on such trash as a Congressman's salacious instant messages and another's even more lurid fiction (the boy was the son of the man BTW), boggles the mind. As a brilliant rocket scientist friend of mine keeps reminding me, half the voters have IQ's under 100.

They both seem to have missed the point. Totally. The issue over Foley's e-mail wasn't that they were vulgar or salacious. It's that they were sent to minors and were a form of sexual harassment. If Foley had sent them to an adult over whom he didn't have any power, NO SCANDAL! Get it. None.

Webb? Wrote a novel. That's why there's no scandal. There is no comparison between real teenagers and fictional characters, except in some fantasyland.

Via Lawyers, Guns and Money.

OK, it's not the entire GOP. But I needed a title.