George Will on George Allen

George Will is my kind of Conservative. And this is a lovely piece of writing. More generally, it is such good news that Jim Webb seems to be ahead. I repeat: Jim Webb is ahead. Anyone in the NDN community who can support his campaign shoud do so. He ran a positive campaign. He ran on the issues. He will be an asset to the Dems in the House on security for a generation. And we will all feel awful if we wake next wednesday and find he lost by a couple of hundred votes.

But Allen, who makes no secret of finding life as a senator tedious, is fighting ferociously for another term, a fate from which his Democratic opponent, Jim Webb, is close to rescuing him. As a result, Allen is dabbling in literary criticism. He has read, or someone has read for him, at least some of Webb's six fine novels, finding therein sexual passages that have caused Allen -- he of the football metaphors, cowboy regalia and Copenhagen smokeless tobacco -- to blush like a fictional Victorian maiden and fulminate like an actual Victorian man, Anthony Comstock, the 19th-century scourge of sin who successfully agitated for New York and federal anti-obscenity statutes and is credited with the destruction of 160 tons of naughty printed matter and pictures.