The party of ideas and values, at your disservice

By Lee Russ

Thursday, October 26, 2006 at 05:11 PM

Quite a week for Republican campaign ads, boy, quite a week. Election as mud wrestling, mud slinging, and yes, once again, stupidity

From black Senate candidate Harold Ford's depiction as a Playboy cavorting with white women to fake pictures and phony quotes of Al Franken, to Michael J. Fox accused of phonying up his Parkinson's symptoms, to implying that Canada is a slacker on international affairs, to Jean Schmidt accusing someone not in the House of Representatives of breaking House rules.

And those are just the ones I know about.

It's probably just my overdeveloped sense of reason, but wouldn't you think that the "party  of ideas" embodied by Abramoff, Cunningham, DeLay, Harris, Burns, Santorum, Foley, Hastert, and Rove would be a little more careful in choosing subjects on which to shoot their mouths off?

The items about Franken and Schmidt are particularly absurd.

The Franken ad accuses Franken of having compared conservatives to Nazis "who should drink poison and die."  Anyone who knows anything about Franken immediately knows that's nonsense.  But the GOP spokes-sleaze quotes Bernard Goldberg's book.  The problem?  Goldberg creates an imaginary interview of Franken, in which Goldberg imagines Franken saying that.

What the hell.  If they can claim "mission accomplished" and detailed knowledge of the location of sites of WMD, they obviously aren't too good at distinguishing the imaginary from the real.

The Jean Schmidt item...that's pure Schmidt.  Not only does she accuse someone not subject too the House rules of violating the House rules, but her complaint is that her opponent, Victoria Wulsin, had the audacity to release an ad that uses a clip of Schmidt's now-famous speech on the House floor in which she told Rep. Murtha that "cowards cut and run, Marines never do."

That's absurd because Schmidt broke a House rule in making that speech.  Those rules prohibit House members from referring to another member by name or disparaging another member on the House floor.  That's why Schmidt's speech caused such a furor and drew so many boos and catcalls from her fellow House members.