Trailing in the polls, Rick “Man on Dog” Santorum and his GOP allies are getting a little antsy. So when Republicans discovered some dirt about a Bob Casey contributor, they thought it might help turn things around. They thought wrong.
Casey took $2,100 from famed low-budget film producer Roger Corman, whose work includes such blockbusters as women-in-prison films “The Big Doll House” and “The Hot Box,” and “nurse” films “The Student Nurses” and “Night Call Nurses.” And let’s not forget the old classic “The Strangler’s Wife.”
The National Republican Senatorial Committee did a little research into Corman’s films and reviews. John O’Connor said in The New York Times in 1980 that Corman had “a genius for exploiting sex and violence, combined with the ability to churn out movies on very low budgets.” The Irish Times, in 1997, called Corman “the king of trash” from his “tinfoil-and-cardboard scifi epics to lurid horror tales and blood-spattered gangster movies.”
NRSC spokesman Brian Nick said, “Based on Casey’s notoriously negative campaign style, let’s hope for the people of Pennsylvania’s sake that this guy isn’t doing his campaign ads.”
Corman’s movies, while tacky, tawdry and cheap as the dickens, are not considered pornography by most. Corman himself has rejected such assertions. So does Casey’s campaign.
Republicans really didn’t think this one through. After all, it was just a couple of months ago when we learned that Santorum accepted $12,000 in donations from Adelphia Communications, which just happens to be the first cable company in the nation to offer the most hardcore pornography legally available in the United States.
Casey accepted donations from the guy who produced Little Shop of Horrors; Santorum took money from a company that offers hardcore porn. Do the Republicans really want to make this a campaign issue?