Republican smear tactics in Ohio

When all else fails, start a whispering campaign that your opponent is gay. Never mind that he's been married (to the same woman, unlike, say, Newt Gingrich or Ronald Reagan) for many years.

If he objects, of course, you can just demand that he prove it. (How, one wonders? By having sex on broadcast television? I thought Republicans and religious conservatives were against that sort of thing, but maybe I was wrong.)

If you're challenged about it in the public press outside your safely insular network of intraparty communiques, you can loudly and publicly fire some convenient person. Meanwhile, you let the e'mail smear circulate through your Astroturf e'mail network of true believers, while refusing to forward a correction or disavowal to that same network. That way you successfully motivate your gay-bashing followers to stampede to the polls to vote against the purported "faggot", while piously claiming to be "doing the right thing" in the view of those outside the circle of the self-appointed elect.

The above brought to you by the Ohio Republican Party and the "Ohio Restoration Project", a tax-free religious group that recruits so-called "Patriot Pastors" to indoctrinate their followers to the worship of Caesar and stumps for partisan political candidates in violation of the law.

Of course, the Bush Administration's IRS is just too, too busy to enforce that law... they have more important things to do. From the LA Times:

[T]he IRS warned All Saints Church in Pasadena that it was reviewing the Episcopal church's tax-exempt status because a priest criticized the Iraq war shortly before the 2004 presidential election. Church leaders say they have no intention of scaling back their criticism of the war....

All Saints still awaits a resolution. Two days before the 2004 presidential election, the Rev. George F. Regas, the church's former rector, delivered a guest sermon that pictured Jesus in a debate with then-candidates George W. Bush and John Kerry.

Although Regas didn't endorse a candidate, he said Jesus would have told Bush that his preemptive war policy "has led to disaster."

The IRS sent the church a letter June 9, 2005, stating that "a reasonable belief exists that you may not be tax-exempt as a church."