Dubbed the "silly season" by political bloggers, campaign season is noteworthy each time around for the race to the bottom by people willing to exploit any angle they have to get a single vote.  In the last few days of this historic election, I keep finding myself humming "Love Will Tear Us Apart" by Joy Division, specifically the lines, "All my failings exposed/Get a taste in my mouth/As desperation takes hold."  Many of us are clutched up in anxiety waiting for Election Day, and short of a massage, the best relaxation is sitting back and laughing at the shenanigans.   

The House race between Illinois 6th District incumbent Peter Roskam and challenger Jill Morgenthaler has become the one to watch, if you look to politics to entertain you.  Roskam holds the seat previously held by the abortion obsessive Henry Hyde, who wrote the infamous Hyde amendment that requires women who receive federal health care to carry pregnancies to term against their will if they can't scrape together the money to pay for abortions.  Roskam, if anything, is even more interested in using his political power to control women's private health care decisions, and this aspect of his political philosophy has become a major factor in Morgenthaler's argument against him.  Morgenthaler has highlighted Roskam's attempts to pass a law that would require women to carry all embryos created for in-vitro fertilization to term, though the bill did not seem to stipulate that women would be required to carry 12 to 15 fetuses at once, which perhaps was its only nod to reality.   

Until this week, Roskam has not had the money to run ads against Morgenthaler, and he's in a state of stress that tends to make political watchers grab the popcorn, because we know it's just a matter of time before something indiscreet comes out of his mouth.  Roskam did not disappoint, as the Pioneer Press reported. 

Citing the late Congressman Henry Hyde, who represented the 6th District for 16 terms until 2006, Roskam said people cannot be categorized by the way in which they were conceived and asked in the Pioneer Press interview why women can have abortions if rapists cannot be executed. 

It's a baffling statement, because the only people who truly want to classify people by their conception are those who espouse "traditional values" and want to classify people into groups known as "legitimate" and "illegitimate" precisely on the circumstances of their conception and their parents' relationship to one another.  As far as I know, no one suggests giving people conceived by rape fewer rights.  The question I want to ask Roskam is, if we don't execute rapists, why do we think it's okay to punish their innocent victims with forced childbirth? 

But it's not a real political circus until someone sues someone else for libel, and challenger Kay Hagan of North Carolina obliged, suing Senate incumbent Elizabeth Dole for defamation and libel. At issue are a series of ads that imply not just that Hagan consorts with atheists, but she herself is "godless."  The ad confuses the words of a local atheist activist, seeming to put them directly in Hagan's mouth, even though Hagan is a Presbyterian who teaches Sunday school.  The lawsuit hurt my feelings a bit, because I'm an atheist and don't see that we're so bad that it's defaming to consort with us, but in a nation that's overrun with culture warriors who want to imply that one can't have religious faith and be pro-choice or pro-gay, I can see the political importance of the lawsuit.  

Dole, who sits in the seat once occupied by Jesse Helms, has tried to defeat Hagan by pulling out all culture warrior stops, blanketing North Carolina with mailers decrying Hagan's unwillingness to write bigotry into the state constitution, and comically showing two male dolls wearing tuxedos, one kneeling in front of the other. I'm taking the kneeling image as a good sign.  It used to be that just showing people same sex dolls standing next to each other would send a community into a tizzy.  Now that's apparently not enough, and they have to use images that unsubtly hint at pornographic ones in order to get people in the right paranoid mindset.  Will the homo-panic fliers during the next campaign season show naked dolls in bed together?  I suspect they'll have to go there. 

The fears of atheism and dude doin' it hasn't managed to help Dole's campaign, though.  In fact, Hagan pulled out even further ahead of Dole in the polls, capturing a 6 point lead going into the weekend before election day, and this in a state with early voting.  Dole no doubt thought the atheist ad would be an October surprise, but unless she has a November surprise, her chances aren't looking so hot.  

Across the country, the culture warrior campaign tactics seem to be losing their luster, after 40 years of being the go-to way for candidates to turn an election away from policy and towards begrudging your neighbor and resisting the future.  Even in the Minnesota race, where anti-choice ads are helping keep Al Franken close to incumbent Norm Coleman in the polls, the ads  seem lackluster and uninspired, running through "child-killing" accusations that have lost much of their power from toothless repetition. Are Americans finally tired of being terrorized with hyperbolic images of out-of-control godless liberalism?  Or is it just a temporary blip, a result of an economic crisis that makes policing your neighbor's bedroom seem less important than it used to?  No one can really say, and it will be years before we know for sure what's going on.