Authors call Senator Macacawitz DELUSIONAL, uncultured.

[Bluebear]

GARRETT EPPS, AUTHOR OF “THE SHAD TREATMENT”: ALLEN’S ATTACK IS “DELUSIONAL.” "To attribute something like that to a novel is really insane," Epps said. He's a Richmond native who teaches at the University of Oregon law school and who wrote the definitive Virginia political novel, "The Shad Treatment." "It verges on the delusional," Epps added Friday…Epps finds all this a bit odd. "Saying that you know a writer by what his characters do in a book is ridiculous," he said. "It would be as if I were afraid that Thomas Harris would eat my heart with a nice cabernet because he wrote 'Silence of the Lambs.' " Epps referred to his own novel as another example. "When I wrote 'The Shad Treatment,' it was about 1973 Virginia," he said. "I had a character who was corrupt. Characters who were racist. Who beat up people in parking lots. "Am I corrupt? No. Am I racist? No. Do I beat people up in parking lots? Certainly not." Epps wondered why the campaign bothered because he wondered why anyone was taking all this seriously…He laughed at Allen's references to Webb as a "fiction novelist and Hollywood screenwriter." "Allen needs to look up the form: fiction, novel," Epps said, pointing at the redundancy. "That's hilarious. Has he read a book?" (Garrett Epps, Daily Press, 10/18/06)

MARGARET SOLTAN, ENGLISH PROFESSOR AT GWU: ALLEN HAS “NO CULTURE.” “Margaret R. Soltan, an English professor at George Washington University, said voters should not regard Webb's novels as indicative of his views, any more than voters in England should have been deterred by some of Winston Churchill's more shocking writing. "To think along those lines exposes you as a person who has no culture," she said.” (WAPO, 10/28/2006)

JOHN CASEY, A NOVELIST AND PROFESSOR OF CREATIVE WRITING AT UVA: Characters in Fiction books do not mirror their authors. He said "authors should not be confused with their characters. "If a character slaps his girlfriend, it doesn't mean that the author slapped his girlfriend," said Casey, who won a National Book Award in 1989 for his novel "Spartina."” (The Virginian-Pilot, 10/28/2006)

http://www.webbforsenate.com/press/release.php?id=228

[liberalhistorian]

1. Allen is as much of a shallow,

ignorant, arrogant hater of anything intellectual as Little Ricky Santorum, with the added megomaniacal belief that they know everything, they know what's best, and anyone who tries to tell them otherwise is the enemy. I cannot WAIT to see them both sent packing, whining and blubbering all the while that a Huge Mistake has been made and it's the end of civilization as we know it because they're no longer senators.

[EST]

2. How apropos-

Years ago, in Russian, the nastiest insult you could hang on a person was to say he was uncultured.
That fits Felix, bush and the vast raft of neoclown adventurists so perfectly.

[Johnyawl]

3. That the Allen campaign would resort to this serves only to demonstrate...

...how little they have to offer, and how desperate they're becoming