Strange Bedfellows

Hey Folks,

There you have it. We've settled the big issues: gays are bad; torture is good; and no one ever said, "Stay the course."

Now!! Onward to the second level of issues dominating the fevered minds of the American electorate: sexy pulp fiction.

- Uke Man


October 28, 2006
‘Brothels, Sex Kittens, Pedophilia?’
By MAUREEN DOWD
(a ukethanks to Phyll)

Republicans panicking is not a pretty sight.

Candidates around the country have been race-baiting,
gay-baiting, Michael J. Fox-baiting and Hispanic-baiting. But
now it has come to this: Republicans are novel-baiting.


Still trying to recover his balance, after slipping on a macaca
and admitting he was a Jewish bubba, one criticized for using
racist language, displaying a Confederate flag at home and
keeping a hangman’s noose at his old law office, Senator George
Allen of Virginia unleashed a vicious attack on Jim Webb
Thursday night. He called him a fiction writer.


Senator Macacawitz, as he is now known in Washington, sent
the cyber- gossip Matt Drudge a press release called “Webb’s
Weird World.” It featured racy quotes from his rival’s novels and
the contention that they were “very disturbing for a
candidate hoping to represent the families of Virginians.”
It said Mr. Webb’s novels about the military and war portrayed
women as “servile, subordinate, inept, incompetent,
promiscuous, perverted, or some combination of these.”


Excerpts from Webb novels included passages in which a man
performs a sexual act on his son; a “naked young stripper” performs a sexual act on a banana, and male guards at a Vietnamese prison camp perform a sexual act on each other.


“There is nothing that’s been in any of my novels that,
in my view, hasn’t been either illuminating surroundings or
defining a character or moving a plot,” Mr. Webb said on
Washington Post radio yesterday.


Mr. Webb, a 60-year-old former Republican and Vietnam vet
who was President Reagan’s secretary of the Navy, was already
defending himself for a 1979 magazine article called “Women
Can’t Fight,” in which he called a Naval Academy dorm a “horny woman’s dream.”


He bridled at the latest attack, snapping, “You ought to read
what George Allen’s sister wrote about him if you want to read
about attitudes toward females.” Mr. Allen’s younger sister,
Jennifer, wrote a memoir in which she described her brother
pulling a Michael Jackson and dangling her over a railing at
Niagara Falls, and slamming a pool cue against her boyfriend’s
head. (She later said the pool-cue story was a joke, calling the
book a novelization of the past.)


So the Old Dominion race now comes down to one guy denying
he’s a racist and the other denying he’s a sexist, and the
supposed sexist attacking the supposed racist as a sexist.
Webb’s campaign sent out a press release yesterday noting that
Mr. Allen nearly joined a males-only country club in the ’90s,
when he was Virginia’s governor, and opposed co-education at
the Virginia Military Institute.


Women make up half of all Virginia voters, so it’s a good bet they will determine who wins the race between two candidates who “exude machismo,” as TheWashington Post put it: “James Webb, the marine firing his M50 antitank rifles in the jungles of Vietnam, and George Allen, the tobacco-chewing cowboy who as governor once stirred G.O.P. delegates with this line about Democrats: ‘Let’s enjoy knocking their soft teeth down their whining throats.’ ”


The Republicans’ usual trick — having Dick Cheney terrify
women into thinking that terrorists will kill their children if
they vote for girly Democrats — isn’t flying this year, so now
the G.O.P. is resorting to more personal, and goofy, attacks.


Senator Allen may be able to hurt Mr. Webb, especially if he
prints up all the steamy quotes on fliers and puts them on the
windshields of Virginia churchgoers on Sunday.


Gary Hart, who used to write novels with another former
senator, William Cohen, once told me that politicians are
suspicious of other pols who read novels, much less write them.
“They thought I was strange,” he said, “because I was caught
reading Tolstoy and Kierkegaard.”


The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee fought back
yesterday by putting out excerpts from G.O.P. pulp fiction.
“Brothels, sex kittens, pedophilia?” they began their sampling
of Republican scribblers, including Lynne Cheney, Newt
Gingrich and Scooter Libby.


The Democrats also turned up a romance novel by Susan
Combs, a Republican candidate for Texas comptroller.
Ms. Combs wrote “A Perfect Match” about “a freckle-faced
brunette,” a cryptologist from the National Security Agency
who falls for her “gray-eyed bodyguard” with his “powerful,
strong arms” and his erotic pistol-cleaning technique. She
desired him to “fill the aching void at her center” where a
“deep heaviness throbbed in her belly.”


It’s what the Democrats’ candidate, Jim Webb, would
diplomatically call “a horny woman’s dream.”