Be warned, this excerpt is taken from Bozell's rightwing "news" source --
<SNIP>
Webb said the release of the excerpts was "a Karl Rove campaign tactic" and a "classic example of the way this campaign has worked. It's smear after smear."
He defended his fiction as "illuminative."
"It's not a sexual act," Webb told Plotkin regarding the "Lost Soldiers" excerpt. "I actually saw this happen in a slum in Bangkok when I was there as a journalist."
"The duty of a writer is to illuminate his surroundings," he added.
Coincidentally, a Cambodian woman in Las Vegas is facing sexual assault charges for performing a similar act on her young son, according to an Oct. 14 report in the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
The article quotes an office manager for the Cambodian Association of America, who described the act as a sign of respect or love.
"It's an exception," Thira Srey told the Review-Journal of the practice. According to the report, the act is usually performed by a mother or caretaker on a child who is one year old or younger. In Webb's novel, the child is four years old.
Webb criticized the Allen campaign for focusing on excerpts from his novels.
"The most important issue facing the country, he hasn't got a statement to make on it," Webb said of the Iraq war. "This country's been breaking into pieces economically ... they've got no position on that.
http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewPolitics.asp?Page=/Politics/archive/200610/POL20061027c.html