This year’s political campaigns have been dirtier and nastier than ever, but in Virginia the political mudslinging has stooped to scraping the bottom of the barrel: literary criticism! According to the Washington Post, Republican Senator George Allen has accused his Democratic opponent, novelist and former Secretary of the Navy James Webb, of writing dirty books. Campaign officials sent excerpts from Webb’s  novels—some depicting graphic sex and incest—to the Drudge Report web site as examples of Webb’s lack of moral character and unfitness for office. Obviously Allen’s staff don’t read Library Journal reviews because among the novels they classified as “Triple XXX” were the highly praised Lost Soldiers (blurbed by fellow Vietnam veteran  Arizona Senator John McCain) and the classic Fields of Fire  Webb unapologetically stood by his work, saying he was proud of his writing ” because it reflects the things he saw as a combat Marine in Vietnam and later as a journalist reporting on war-torn regions such as Beirut in the early 1980s.” LJ reviewer David Keymer who praised Lost Soldiers noted in an email,  ”Politics gets worse daily. I’d say this one was a new low but Rush Limbaugh won that award with his remarks on Michael J. Fox’s illness.”