I never pegged Senator George Allen as much of a reader. Nor, after his sister’s memoir, did I imagine he spent much time worrying about the mistreatment of women. But last week he sounded more like a English major with a minor in gender studies than a foul-mouthed ex-football jock when he complained that his opponent’s novels portrayed women as “servile, subordinate, inept, incompetent, promiscuous, perverted, or some combination of these.”
It seems like a Saturday Night Live parody of a political attack until you focus on two of the adjectives: promiscuous and perverted. That is because the Republican’s October surprise turns out to be moral depravity.
In Wisconsin they accused one Democratic Congressional candidate of spending tax dollars to study Vietnamese prostitutes and another of having connections to a child molester. In New York, they accused a Democrat of dialing a fantasy hotline. And in Tennessee, they accused Harold Ford of taking money from a porn producer and meeting a white woman at a Playboy party.
After ten years of corrupt Republican rule, this is apparently the best that Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman can come up with. Let us pray that election day the American public makes it their last, dying gasp.
