The Bottomless GOP Slime Pit

I got some e-mail yesterday from people asking me if I was going to comment on two recent pieces of Republican slime that had just hit the news and what struck me as strange was how aghast a couple of my readers were by the low-rent and despicable nature of the right-wing antics.

I guess I'm just immune after so many years of it because, at this point in my life, nothing Republicans do -- especially leading up to a big election -- shocks me any longer.

The main thing readers were referencing was the latest garbage flowing from the mouth of Rush "Oxycontin King" Limbaugh, who yesterday implied that the recent television ad done by actor Michael J. Fox for Missouri Democratic Senate candidate Claire McCaskill, which focuses on stem cell research, was done by Fox while he was intentionally off his medication for Parkinson's disease.

There is a stem cell initiative on the ballot in Missouri and, as Fox appears in the ad to promote McCaskill over her opponent, Republican Jim Talent, who does not support such research, the actor is shaking, while rocking back and forth, clearly showing the effects of Parkinson's.

Here's the ad:



And there was Limbaugh -- who's got a lot of nerve talking about anyone else's medication -- who said on his show "I stated when I saw the ad, I was commenting to you about it, that he was either off the medication or he was acting. He is an actor, after all."

Limbaugh prefaced this with the Fox News-like tactic of declaring that "some are saying" that the actor has admitted to sometimes going off his medication when making appearances "…as a means of illustrating the ravages of disease."

Why does this kind of thing surprise some of you so much? In the all-star lineup of Republican cretins, Limbaugh is a scumbag's, scumbag and he made this comment for one reason only: Because Fox made a very effective ad for a Democrat. That's all there is to it.

Republican slimeball number two of whom some of your wrote is John Spencer, the tomato can who's been put up to get clobbered by Senator Hillary Clinton in this year's New York Senate race.

According to the New York Daily News, Spencer commented negatively on Senator Clinton's appearance as a younger woman and suggested she has received "millions of dollars" in plastic surgery. The Daily News reports that Spencer made the statements while on a flight to Rochester and speaking to a reporter sitting with him and his wife.

"You ever see a picture of her back then? Whew," said Spencer of Clinton's younger days. "I don't know why Bill married her."

"She looks good now," he said.

Senator Clinton's campaign has declined to comment on Spencer's bizarre statements other than to say that Clinton, who turns 59 this week, has never had plastic surgery.

Again, none of this should come as any surprise. These are the same people who swiftboated John Kerry and who viciously smeared Max Cleland, who had three limbs blown off in Vietnam, by placing him next to Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein in television ads for the 2002 Georgia Senate election.

It's Republicans like these two who smeared John McCain in the 2000 South Carolina presidential primary -- and went after his wife and daughter as well -- and who, in 1988 attacked Kitty Dukakis, when the Willie Horton ads weren't damaging enough to her husband, Democratic presidential nominee, Michael Dukakis.

So go ahead and be a bit disgusted with the likes of Limbaugh, Spencer, Karl Rove and whoever the next GOP smear merchant will be to slither up to the plate.

But do yourself a favor and expect it from them at all times. The shock wears off after a while.