Below The Beltway

Today’s Washington Post points out just how absurd the campaign for President got yesterday:

IT’S HARD to think of a presidential campaign with a wider chasm between the seriousness of the issues confronting the country and the triviality, so far anyway, of the political discourse. On a day when the Congressional Budget Office warned of looming deficits and a grim economic outlook, when the stock market faltered even in the wake of the government’s rescue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, when President Bush discussed the road ahead in Iraq and Afghanistan, on what did the campaign of Sen. John McCain spend its energy? A conference call to denounce Sen. Barack Obama for using the phrase “lipstick on a pig” and a new television ad accusing the Democrat of wanting to teach kindergartners about sex before they learn to read.

I’ve already addressed the ridiculousness of the “lipstick on a pig” nonsense here, here, here, and here.

As for the sex-eduction ad, it’s fairly clear that the McCain campaign is engaging in some serious distortion of reality:

The original controversy dates to 2003, when a bill to modify the teaching of sex education in Illinois was introduced in the Legislature. The proposal was supported by a coalition of education and public health organizations, including the Illinois Parent Teacher Association, the Illinois State Medical Society, the Illinois Public Health Association and the Illinois Education Association.

Mr. Obama voted for the bill in committee, where it passed, but it never came to a full and final vote. The proposal called for “age and developmentally appropriate” sex education and also allowed parents the option of withdrawing their children from such classroom instruction if they felt that it clashed with their beliefs or values.

In referring to the sex-education bill, the McCain campaign is largely recycling old and discredited accusations made against Mr. Obama by Alan Keyes in their 2004 Senate race. At that time, Mr. Obama stated that he understood the main objective of the legislation, as it pertained to kindergarteners, to be to teach them how to defend themselves against sexual predators.

“I have a 6-year-old daughter and a 3-year-old daughter, and one of the things my wife and I talked to our daughter about is the possibility of somebody touching them inappropriately, and what that might mean,” Mr. Obama said in 2004. “And that was included specifically in the law, so that kindergarteners are able to exercise some possible protection against abuse, because I have family members as well as friends who suffered abuse at that age.”

It is a misstatement of the bill’s purpose, therefore, to maintain, as the McCain campaign advertisement does, that Mr. Obama favored conventional sex education as a policy for 5-year-olds. Under the Illinois proposal, “medically accurate” education about more complicated topics, including intercourse, contraception and homosexuality, would have been reserved for older students in higher grades.

The advertisement, then, also misrepresents what the bill meant by “comprehensive.” The instruction the bill required was comprehensive in that it called for a curriculum that went from kindergarten and through high school, not in the sense that kindergarteners would have been fully exposed to the entire gamut of sex-related issues.

The commercial is a lie, plain and simple.

Yep, it’s silly season alright.