Jim Webb's Barnburner

Mike Whitney

Nothing scares the "powers that be" more than a straight-shooting populist who can rally people against government policy. And, yet, that’s exactly what happened on Tuesday night in the Democratic response to the State of the Union Speech (S.O.T.U.). In just 9 minutes, freshman Senator, Jim Webb took a sledgehammer to Bush’s policy in Iraq and left 45 million Americans cheering for more. It was a tour de force the likes of which we haven’t seen since Harold Pinter gave his Noble acceptance speech 2 years ago. Webb was brilliant. He not only erased 40 minutes of Bush-blather and demagoguery; he lifted the country out of the squalor of pessimism by pointing the way out of Iraq and towards greater economic justice. Hoorah! Isn’t that what leadership is all about? It’s ironic that it took a former Reagan Republican to lower the boom on Bush; especially when the burgeoning crop of Democratic presidential hopefuls are stumbling over themselves to appear more antiwar than the other...

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