Say What? The GOP smut edition

Posted by Lakshmi Chaudhry at 11:13 AM on November 1, 2005.

Der Spiegel offers up this pop quiz, as in: Guess who penned these immortal lines:

He could feel her heart beneath his hands. He moved his hands slowly lower still and she arched her back to help him and her lower leg came against his. He held her breasts in his hands. Oddly, he thought, the lower one might be larger.... One of her breasts now hung loosely in his hand near his face and he knew not how best to touch her. [LINK thanks to David Addams]

The perplexed soul is none other than Setsuo, the virginal Japanese protagonist of "The Apprentice," a 1996 work of great literary aspiration authored by none other than Scooter Libby. Der Spiegel pulls the quote from a far more interesting New Yorker piece, which reveals Libby as merely the latest in a long line of Republican smut-mongers:

Libby has a lot to live up to as a conservative author of erotic fiction. As an article in SPY magazine pointed out in 1988, from Safire ("[She] finally came to him in the bed and shouted 'Arragghrrorwr!' in his ear, bit his neck, plunged her head between his legs and devoured him") to Buckley ("I’d rather do this with you than play cards") to Liddy ("T’sa Li froze, her lips still enclosing Rand’s glans . . .") to Ehrlichman ("It felt like a little tongue") to O'Reilly ("Okay, Shannon Michaels, off with those pants"), extracurricular creative writing has long been an outlet for ideas that might not fly at, say, the National Prayer Breakfast.

But Libby seems to have lowered -- or raised (call me fair and balanced, baby) -- the bar with his novel that features these many-splendored visions of depravity:

Homoeroticism and incest also figure as themes. The main female character, Yukiko, draws hair on the "mound" of a little girl. The brothers of a dead samurai have sex with his daughter. ...

Other sex scenes are less conventional. Where his Republican predecessors can seem embarrassingly awkward—the written equivalent of trying to cop a feel while pinning on a corsage—Libby is unabashed: "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."

And, finally: "He asked if they should fuck the deer."

The answer, reader, is yes.

No doubt both animals and young children are relieved that the neoconservatives chose to realize Scooter's plan for global domination rather than his literary vision.

P.S.: Maybe the Bambi photo goes a little too far ... Not!

Lakshmi Chaudhry is a senior editor at In These Times, and the former senior editor of AlterNet. You can write to her at lakshmi@alternet.org.