It appears Democrat Virginia Senate candidate Jim Webb has gotten himself stuck somewhere between the devil and the deep blue sea and totally off the truth meter by grossly overstating his efforts on behalf of women in the military.
The problem is Webb has been widely cited making the ridiculous claim of having "tripled the number of billets available to women as Secretary of the Navy” and putting together "a task force which opened up more operational billets to women than any other secretary of the Navy in history” on “his own initiative”.
The claim can be refuted on its face, though the details are probably worse. Anyone who knows the military and how it deals with change would know that a Secretary of the Navy, or any branch of the military, claiming to have changed anything in less than a year, let alone initiating and seeing through pioneering change, can not possibly be telling the truth. Webb was Secretary of the Navy for less than ten months.
Even worse for Webb, from his own site:
As Navy Secretary, James Webb ordered a crackdown on sexual harassment and increased training programs to counter sexual harassment. [December 28, 1987, St. Petersburg Times, Enlightenment on the seas; 12/21/1987, Christian Science Monitor]
Would that training be part of what led to the part Navy disaster known as the Tailhook Scandal of 1991? Unfortunately for Webb, his even more often cited misogynist rhetoric on women in the Navy reads more like his legacy on the issue, assuming he was Secretary long enough to even have a legacy, which is doubtful, at best.
Issues regarding women in the Navy go back a long way, perhaps really beginning to enter the contemporary period with the Zumwalt memo in 1972. You likely find billets for women mentioned in it far more frequently than any communique from Jim Webb. And here's an informative 2004 USNI article on women at sea. Webb wasn't running for anything in 2004, no doubt that's why the review of the issue doesn't appear to mention him at all. Yet the media is happy to tell everyone now of this mysterious great contribution of Webb's, too long over looked? Puhlease....
Even more info debunking Webb's ridiculous claims here, via the Allen campaign.
Update: The latest on the race from the WaPo is here.
Comments