One More

post before I hang it up for tonight.

This is the Salon article about how S.'s past and present are assets to his gubernatorial campaign.

A couple of choice excerpts:

"One day when you're a young man pumping iron at Gold's Gym in Venice, Calif., a 'black girl' shows up naked, and all the guys get to take her upstairs for a gang bang. Out in public in the free-wheeling '70s, stewardesses, waitresses and teachers--'a great many teachers,' actually--walk right up and say, 'I really dig your body and want to fuck the shit out of you.' Now and again, 'a blonde with great tits and a great ass' turns out to be as 'smart as her breasts look.' And in your mid-50s, a role in a Hollywood movie gives you the once-in-a-lifetime chance to 'take a woman, grab her upside down, and bury her face in a toilet bowl.'"

That's a damned good summary of family values paragon S.

"The problem for [S.] isn't just a 1977 interview with Oui magazine that surfaced this week--although, with references to oral sex and group sex and admissions of drug use, the interview is clearly a problem. The real risk for [S.] is that women, the religious right and the Bush White House itself will be turned off by a pattern of raunchy talk--and allegations of raunchy behavior--that began in the 1970s and apparently continues into the present.

"In anecdote after anecdote, article after article, from the 1977 Oui article to a July interview in Esquire, [S.] comes across as a man who speaks in the rudest and crudest fashion possible about women, men and the things they sometimes do together. And if allegatons made about [S.] in a 2001 piece in Premiere are true, his over-the-top and up-the-skirt attitudes about women translate to actions to well."

There is a difference between Bush and S., however. The media, because it is in the pocket of the Republican Party, ignored or whitewashed all of Bush's past sleaziness. Incriminating evidence was ignored or buried. With S., everything is a matter of public record, as his alleged boorishness has been the subject of magazine reports for over a quarter of a century.

The media have tried to be Esskissers, but it hasn't really worked.