In his column today in the Washington Post, former Bush chief speechwriter Michael Gerson rips Al Franken for his 2000 piece in Playboy magazine, a satirical piece in praise of pornography (and no, I'm not linking the column because the more hits it gets, the more WarPo will pay him).
Yes, it's old news that Gerson is the word wizard who came up with the "smoking gun/mushroom cloud" metaphor and other phrases of mass deception in 2002 for the murderous White House Iraq Group to sell its war for oil to a gullible public and press.
Yes, we here know Gerson as the rankest kind of hypocrite and aren't surprised he'd attack Franken and praise incumbent Sen. Norm Coleman.
But why would he let his erstwhile Bush crime family colleague slash novelist I. Lewis Libby off the hook for Libby's 1996 venture into sleaze with his novel "The Apprentice"?
It contains the sneakiest kind of porn:
He said that boys from the village took the merchant’s daughter places, and word spread that she had many lovers. There were odd tales of her sexual prowess, and they said she had coupled with dogs and men and several of the boys at once. Then to their village came a young samurai, who spotted the girl as all did, and she folded him into her. She took other lovers in the village, which enraged him, but he would not be done with her....
The young samurai’s mother had the child sold to a brothel, where she swept the floors and oiled the women and watched the secret ways. At age ten the madam put the child in a cage with a bear trained to couple with young girls so the girls would be frigid and not fall in love with their patrons. They fed her through the bars and aroused the bear with a stick when it seemed to lose interest. Groups of men paid to watch. Like other girls who have been trained this way, she learned to handle many men in a single night and her skin turned a milky white. ...
They gave her wooden penises and taught her how to handle them. They taught her how to sing out in the night and move to finish off her customers more quickly.
One could search high and low for a piece by Gerson criticizing that trash by Libby and come up blank. Likely the same would occur with the soft-porn world of Laurie "Mrs. Norm" Coleman.
Her career has included dancing and acting, with a part in "The Vagina Monologues" in the Twin Cities -- "which raised a lot of eyebrows," she admits. ... "Republicans can have fun," she pointed out. .