Hung up on sex

Have you noticed that Republicans are really hung up on sex? They certainly don't give much weight to competence or even honesty -- you can be awfully incompetent and corrupt and not make a Republican blink but, man will they twist their knickers into a knot and obsess over anything remotely involving sex. Of course, the media loves to cooperate with them in this as the media loves to titilate as they tut-tut.

Much has been written about the RNC decision to empty its $100 million war chest to flood the airwaves with smutty personal attacks on Democrats and the accusations (as Billmon shows below) don't have to be true as long as they're sordid. As I said before about the Foley business, it got the attention it did because it involved sex (period).

Pathetic. But more pathetic still if it proves successful.

Billmon:

The name of the end game, it seems, is "localizing" the races by smearing Democratic challengers with the products of the Republican oppo research extravaganza, backed up by that $100 million the Emperor Karl was taking about. This clearly was part of the plan all along, but what's striking is the degree to which the reptiles have scoured the closets for any hint of sexual misconduct (or just plain conduct) on the part of their intended targets. And so we get:

• A state GOP commercial in Wisconsin's 8th Congressional District that tries to link Democrat Steve Kagen to a child rapist. (They were represented by the same lawyer in two different cases -- a bill collection suit in Kagen's case.)

• In the neighboring Wisconsin 3rd, the GOP candidate has recycled an ad first used North Carolina wing nut Vernon Robertson, accusing his opponent of voting to fund studies of Vietnamese prostitutes and the mastubatory practices of old men (few and far between, I could have told them.)

• I'll let the LA Times tell the next one: "[Tennessee GOP Senate candidate Bob] Corker, in a rare move, on Friday publicly urged the Republican National Committee to withdraw a new ad that features a blond white woman -- presumably an actress -- cooing into the camera that she met [Democrat Harold Ford Jr.] at a party sponsored by Playboy magazine. (Did we forget to mention that she was a white woman?)

• And then there's my favorite: In New York's 24th district, lizard central (a.ka. the National Republican Congressional Committee) has an ad up accusing the Democratic candidate of billing the taxpayers for a telephone sex chat -- apparently because he dialed a wrong number.

Those are the just the ones I've heard about this weekend. I imagine there are more out there hitting the airwaves in closely contested districts -- or will before Nov. 7 rolls around. And then there are the purely gratuitous sexual attacks on non-candidates such as Cindy Sheehan.

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But right now, for the Rovian machine, it simply means picking up whatever sexual mud happens to be at hand and throwing it against the wall to see if it will stick. Will it work? Probably not -- at least, not well enough to hold back the Democratic wave. As the Clinton impeachment saga showed, aiming directly at your opponent's personal sex life is dicey. It can make voters uneasy about their own hidden habits.

Still, I have to laugh when I see or hear media analysts -- even earnest liberal ones -- warning that some particularly nasty sexual ad may backfire, even as they help publicize it. In some specific cases that may be true, as for example, with the ridiculous sex phone claim cited above. But more generally they're simply helping disseminate the message that all politicians -- and politics in general -- are sexually sleazy. And at this point that's probably the best the Rovians can hope for.

[...]

Update 6:40 PM ET: I'm imagining an epitaph: "Here lies the American republic, victim of modern communications technology and its own sexual puritanism."