The Smiley Hypothesis

In one of John le Carré's "Smiley" novels, the fictional spymaster floats the notion that British intelligence might profit by looking more closely at the cover stories that enemy agents invented for themselves. If the cover identity gives children to a childless man, or describes a married woman as single, might that be suggestive of inner motives or desires that MI6 profilers could exploit?

This line of thinking comes to mind when I read some of the motives that Republicans project onto their political enemies. For example, in 2003, Sen. Rick Santorum famously expressed his concern that,

In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That's not to pick on homosexuality. It's not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be.

Santorum was, and continues to be, roundly and deservedly mocked for the remark. Even the USAToday reporter to whom Santorum gave the quote expressed consternation when the senator introduced the image into the interview:

I'm sorry, I didn't think I was going to talk about "man on dog" with a United States senator, it's sort of freaking me out.

Freaking out, indeed. Like Smiley, though, I can't help wondering what we might learn if we took psychological back-bearings from that point. Because, of course, what's astonishing, disturbing--creepy--is not that Santorum would say such a thing, but that it would even come to mind. What's lurking up there in that noggin of his?

All of which brings us, today, to Ohio.

The Ohio Republican Party, leaking electoral opportunity like a seive, took a drunken roundhouse swing yesterday at Democratic Rep Sherrod Brown. As Think Progress documents, the OH GOP press release about Republican bête noire Al Franken, who's giving his support to Brown, contains both a fabricated quote and a fabricated photo, both concerning Franken.

You can see the quote and the photo here.

I can almost understand the sloppy mistake behind the fake quote--that's what happens when you're in a hurry and not inclined to pay much attention to detail.

But the fake photo? That took some time and attention to detail--which, following what we might call the Smiley Hypothesis, raises the ugly, ugly question:

What lesion on whose soul motivated them to choose that picture, of all possible pictures, to gratuitously drop Franken's head into? Was there a moment when someone said, "Hey I know, let's find a picture of a man in adult diapers and pink rabbit ears clutching a big white teddy bear on a child's bed!"--and if so, was there not one other person in the room to say, like Santorum's interviewer, "Uhm, dude, this is sort of freaking me out"?

Even more to the point: Did they just "happen" have that original picture lying around anyway? Or did they find the idea so, uhm, motivating that they willingly did the online scouring necessary until they located one?

Or even more unappetizing to wonder: Did someone, swept up in the excitement generated by the possibilities in such an obviously good idea, volunteer to model for the picture?