James Webb has become popular in the left blogosphere by denouncing the swift boating of John Murtha.

Brad DeLong actually claims that he is an honorable gentleman .

Oh yeah ? and what about this ?

The single factor that undid much of the established cohesion of the female and male midshipmen, however, was the publication, midway through their senior year, of James Webb’s article “Women Can’t Fight.”[45] A 1968 graduate who spent two months as a “writer-in-residence” at Annapolis, Webb argued that the presence of women “sterilized” the Academy by turning it in to “a test tube for social experimentation.”[46] Webb hit a powerful chord in the minds of many Naval Academy alumni, particularly those who, like him, had battle experience and believed that women did not belong in combat and, by extension, at Annapolis.[47] Claiming that women “poisoned” the institution, Webb declared that he would never want to be in combat with any of the female midshipmen he knew.[48] As male midshipmen pasted copies of the article on the walls of Bancroft Hall, the women realized that Webb had undermined any respect and acceptance that they had managed to achieve during their four years at the Academy.[49]

It took me unusually long to google up the goods on Webb. The key keyword was wuba