Bimbos and strippers and bears, oh my

Keeping score on the hardball competition for the U.S. Senate:

As I mentioned last week, the Republican National Committee has been financing a Tennessee TV ad which resurrects the Old South racist fears about miscegenation. The ad suggested that black Democratic senatorial candidate Harold Ford Jr. – who is currently locked in a tight and pivotal race with his GOP opponent - might be tempted to enjoy the sexual favors of white women, thanks to the bare-shouldered model/bimbo who coos into the camera, “Harold! Call me!”

Yesterday, on CBS’ Face the Nation, Republican chairman Ken Mehlman staged an elaborate verbal dance, in his trademark rapid-fire delivery: Yes, he paid for the ad, and, yes, it did say on the air that his committee was responsible for the contents of the ad, but, under federal law as written, he actually had no say over the ad contents because the ad was independently produced, yet despite all that, “I didn’t think it was necessarily a racist ad,” and yet despite the fact that he semi-denies that the ad was racist, “I would not have put the ad up” in the first place.

Got all that?

He’s technically right about the campaign finance laws, which limit how much the national parties can directly spend on individual campaigns – but which permit the parties to spend with unfettered abandon if they set up “independent” committees that operate without any oversight from the party overlords.

But here’s the key point: Mehlman hired the person who in turn hired the person who produced the “independent” Tennessee ad. So even though Mehlman may have been officially in the dark about this specific ad, it strains credulity to believe that he didn’t know what kind of ad his “independent” ad producer would create. Especially since this ad producer would not have been hired in the first place, to act “independently” and provide Mehlman with official deniability, unless he had been sanctioned by top GOP officials.

Or perhaps it’s a total coincidence that the ad producer, Scott Howell, turns out to be a longstanding associate of Karl Rove’s, going way back to the latter’s days as a direct-mail specialist in Texas; and that Howell was one of the producers who in 2002 helped defeat Georgia Democratic Sen. Max Cleland by crafting a TV ad which charged that the triple-amputee Vietnam vet was weak on Osama bin Laden (whose face appeared in the ad).

And perhaps Mehlman would be totally stunned to discover that Howell had been hired for the Tennessee job by Terry Nelson, who in turn had been hired by Mehlman to run the “independent” GOP operations. Perhaps Mehlman had no inkling of Nelson’s own track record, which includes ties to Chris LaCivita, the GOP consultant who helped the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth map their ’04 attacks on John Kerry.

In other words, perhaps Mehlman was truly shocked, shocked at the contents of the “Harold, call me” commercial.

Or perhaps, on this point, he is no different than the Claude Rains character who tut-tutted gambling in Casablanca, then pocketed his winnings.

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Tuning to Fox News Sunday, meanwhile, I was curious to see whether it would further the story which broke last Friday, concerning some smutty novelistic passages that were written years ago by James Webb, the Virginia Democrat and best-selling novelist who is locked in a tight Senate race with incumbent Republican George Allen.

But Fox News said nary a word, a testament to the story's debateable news value.

Allen partisans have been trying to push this charge for weeks, the idea that what Webb made up 15 or 20 years ago should be deemed at least as important as what Allen said in real life on the campaign trail this year (using a racial slur to describe a Virginia-born Indian-American). The Drudge Report finally took the bait late last week, and I even received a grand total of two emails urging me to get with the program.

In a way, it’s ironic that Allen partisans see the Webb excerpts as a disqualifier for the Senate (actually, they wouldn’t be complaining about the Webb passages at all if Allen was cruising to victory, as originally expected), because Webb the novelist has seemed mainly interested in defending military culture against what he views as weak-kneed antiwar liberals back home. Somehow the Allen partisans overlook this.

It’s undeniable that Webb has written some gamy passages – for instance, about female strippers in Thailand using fruit as accessories, and about a Southeast Asian man who hoists his four-year-old son and puts the boy’s penis in his mouth – but, as a novelist, his overall intent has been to vividly depict the stresses and strains on U.S. fighting men, along with the usual episodes of decadence and deprivation. His efforts have prompted raves from all kinds of reviewers. Here’s praise, for instance, for the book that included the father-and-son scene:

“James Webb’s new novel paints a portrait of a modern Vietnam charged with hopes for the future but haunted by the ghosts of its war-torn past. It captures well the lingering scars of the war, and exposes the tension between the dynamism of a new generation and the invisible bondage of an older generation for whom wartime allegiances, and animosities, are rendered no less vivid by the passage of time. A novel of revenge and redemption that tells us much about both where Vietnam is headed and where it has been.”

The reviewer was John McCain.

The idea that a candidate should be judged on what he makes up in the fiction realm seems a tad dubious…but I’ll just quote this guy: “I don't think that works of fiction, especially scenes taken out of context, give any enlightenment to the policy position of the candidates. I've written fiction, and plan to do so again in the future. If I depict a brutal murder, does that make me a potential murderer? If I write about a rape, does that make me a potential rapist? I think not, and the notion that this is in any way relevant to the policies of import to Virginians insults the voters both candidates want to convince to support them.”

That’s the guy at Captain’s Quarters, a conservative blog that supports George Allen.

I could also spend time quoting from novels penned by indicted Dick Cheney aide Scooter Libby (who wrote a scene that described children being placed in a cage with a bear, for sexual purposes), and by Cheney’s spouse Lynne (who wrote some lesbian scenes), to make the point that this is what novelists, of all political persuasions, sometimes do…but I’ll just quote this commentator: “Are the (Webb) passages…bizarre and perverted? Yes. But they are no more proof of Webb's immorality and unfitness for office than the passages in ‘Sisters’ are proof that Lynne Cheney hates men, or that the passages in ‘The Apprentice’ are proof that Scooter Libby endorses sex between children and bears.”

That’s blogger and columnist Michelle Malkin, the scourge of Democrats.

I guess it’s a good thing that Philip Roth never ran for the Senate in New Jersey.