Seems the GOP can’t stop thinking about sex here in the last days of the campaign. The Foley scandal really seems to have flipped them into batshit crazy mode. So we get ads expressing moral outrage that Harold Ford once attended a Super Bowl party where Playboy Playmates were present. We get the Allen campaign’s attempt to sexualize a scene from Jim Webb’s novel. We get President Bush signing a bill for “National ‘Character Counts’ Week,” just before jetting off to raise money for Rep. Don Sherwood, a family values crusader who not only admitted to having an affair, but recently settled a lawsuit accusing him of continually physically assaulting his mistress.

More from today’s Washington Post:

Rep. Ron Kind pays for sex!

Well, that’s what the Republican challenger for his Wisconsin congressional seat, Paul R. Nelson, claims in new ads, the ones with “XXX” stamped across Kind’s face.

It turns out that Kind — along with more than 200 of his fellow hedonists in the House — opposed an unsuccessful effort to stop the National Institutes of Health from pursuing peer-reviewed sex studies.

In New York, the NRCC ran an ad accusing Democratic House candidate Michael A. Arcuri, a district attorney, of using taxpayer dollars for phone sex. “Hi, sexy,” a dancing woman purrs. “You’ve reached the live, one-on-one fantasy line.” It turns out that one of Arcuri’s aides had tried to call the state Division of Criminal Justice, which had a number that was almost identical to that of a porn line. The misdial cost taxpayers $1.25.

In Ohio, GOP gubernatorial candidate J. Kenneth Blackwell, trailing by more than 20 points in polls, has accused front-running Democratic Rep. Ted Strickland of protecting a former aide who was convicted in 1994 on a misdemeanor indecency charge. Blackwell’s campaign is also warning voters through suggestive “push polls” that Strickland failed to support a resolution condemning sex between adults and children. Strickland, a psychiatrist, objected to a line suggesting that sexually abused children cannot have healthy relationships when they grow up.

The Republican Party of Wisconsin distributed a mailing linking Democratic House candidate Steve Kagen to a convicted serial killer and child rapist. The supposed connection: The “bloodthirsty” attorney for the killer had also done legal work for Kagen.

The Post does mention an attack ad by a Democrat chastising her GOP opponent for attending a frat party. So shame on her, too.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 27th, 2006 at 9:29 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.