In a June 11 Newsmax column, Lowell Ponte asserted that “liberal press began a furious attack on one of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama’s most likely vice-presidential picks, Virginia Sen. Jim Webb.” The only examples Ponte provides, though, are from Slate’s Timothy Noah and a writer for the Politico — and Ponte offers no evidence that either of them are “liberal.”
Ponte claimed that “The current senior Democrat in the U.S. Senate, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, is a former Grand Kleagle in the Ku Klux Klan. Both Clinton and Obama have knelt to kiss his ring.” He then went on to suggest a reason why Democrats purportedly don’t like Webb:
Is Webb’s sin that he is not racist enough to be trusted to stay in the political party of the slave owners, that once backed the Klan, Jim Crow, Bull Connor, and racial preferences?
Ponte, by the way, has done his own bit of ring-kissing for racists in the form of approvingly quoting Strom Thurmond in a 2004 column.
Ponte also claimed that Obama has “a voting record the impartial National Journal called the ‘most liberal’ in the U.S. Senate” without mentioning the subjective nature of NJ’s scorecard; for instance, a vote to implement the bipartisan 9-11 Commission’s homeland security recommendations was considered to be “liberal.”
Ponte’s weird gushing over Webb (Ponte says he and Webb “were both in the Reserve Officer Training Corps at the University of Southern California at the same time during the early 1960s”) ignores the fact that Republicans mounted a desperate campaign against him in the 2006 Virginia Senate race against George Allen, to the point that CNSNews.com apparently worked in concert with Allen’s campaign to smear Webb by portraying what he wrote in his novels as the views of Webb himself.