T-Minus Thirteen

We are less than two weeks away from Election Day, and Americans will likely welcome the post November 7 reprieve from Macaca, maf54 and, most of all, negative attacking campaign advertisements. Not me, however; I love this shit.

Here in the Windy City, freshman Democratic Representative Melissa Bean looks to be secure in retaining her seat, but that hasn't stopped her opponent David McSweeney from going negative. Of course, his only tangible point seems to be that folks shouldn't re-elect Bean because Nancy Pelosi is ugly. Really. McSweeney doesn't say anything too bad about either Bean or Pelosi, he simply uses unflattering pictures of the House Minority Leader to make (or more accurately, not make) his point. A non-sequitur? Sure…but this is Chicago politics.

Just north in cheese-head land, Republican Paul R. Nelson is challenging incumbent Ron Kind and using recycled GOP verbiage to do so. Try guessing which "offense" Kind is not accused of supporting:

• Studying bisexual, transgendered and two-spirited Aleutian Eskimos
• Studying the sex lives of Vietnamese prostitutes
• Studying the masturbation habits of old men
• Paying teenage girls to watch pornographic movies with probes connected to their genitalia
• Studying the affects of sleep deprivation on the sexual appetites of pre- and post-pubescent boys

(Calm down, Mr. Foley. I made up the last one)

Rush Limbaugh, apparently offended that his name has recently slipped to #2 or #3 on the national Republican windbag wacko list, is attacking Michael J. Fox for his support of several national Democratic candidates who support stem cell research. Limbaugh's beef? That Fox is "exaggerating" his Parkinson's to make for more compelling TV. Really, Rush? If Fox cared enough about compelling TV that he was willing to exploit his own disease, wouldn't he have taken steps to ensure that Spin City didn't suck so badly?

In Tennessee, rising star Dem Harold Ford is in a surprisingly tight race for the Senate seat held by Bob Corker (not too many liberals with family baggage make it in the South…and his black skin doesn't help matters either). And yet, Ford has become so much of a threat that Corker's campaign has resorted to using thinly-veiled racial attacks to support his more obvious political ones:

Corker depicts himself as "more senatorial" than Ford but is running an almost entirely negative campaign at this point. He depicts Ford as a smooth-talking city slicker… [but] the hardest blows have come from the national GOP. The National Republican Senatorial Committee ridicules Ford's expensive tastes on a "Fancy Ford" website, and the Republican National Committee is airing a controversial new ad that features a scantily clad blonde who says she met Ford at a Playboy party. "Harold, call me!" the woman chirps.

Democrats, meanwhile, seem content to simply allow voters to draw their own lines between GOP candidates and a certain historically unpopular president. I mean, who knew that simply shaking hands with the Interloper could be enough to decide an otherwise tight election? Of course, Dennis Hastert has decided to do his GOP cronies one better, inviting to his home and posing with the self-described "spiritual advisor to the scum of the Earth". I wonder if K.A. Paul has ever been to Crawford, TX?