The art of opposition research

RI Sen candidate Stephen Laffey: I hate
faggots

Senate hopeful explains anti-gay columns

Sat Aug 26, 8:32 PM ET

CRANSTON, R.I. - U.S. Senate candidate Stephen Laffey said he regrets that he wrote columns denigrating gays when he was a college student.........................The paper reported that it received copies of the columns anonymously in the mail earlier in the week.

Laffey, 44................called the writings "sophomoric political satire" and said they do not represent his views.

"Do I regret some of these things? Sure," he said. "But at the time, we were just having fun. We thought it was funny."

The Republican candidate wrote them in 1983 and 1984 while studying at Bowdoin College in Maine. The articles appeared in a paper published by campus Republicans.

In one column, Laffey said he has never seen a happy homosexual.

"This is not to say there aren't any; I simply haven't seen one in my lifetime. Maybe they are all in the closet," he wrote. "All the homosexuals I've seen are sickly and decrepit, their eyes devoid of life."

In another column he wrote that pop music was turning the children of America into sissies, and criticized the singer Boy George, referring to him as "it."

"It wears girl's clothes and puts on makeup," he wrote. "When I hear it sing, 'Do you really want to hurt me, do you really want to make me cry,' I say to myself, YES, I want to punch your lights out, pal, and break your ribs."

Oh, this didn't appear in the paper by accident. Bowdoin College, early 80's? Only two ways this appears in public, one, someone kept it, two, some Republican mole went to Bowdoin's library and looked it up.

No Dem would do this, for two reasons. One, why the subterfuge? If I was gay or a Dem, I wouldn't drop this off, I'd march into the Providence Journal with them, explaining how I got them. Two, you want to run against Club of Growth wingnut Laffey.

Come on, at a small school like Bowdoin College, these guys must have been freaks. Someone must have remembered this, or more likely, that he wrote for a local version of the GOP's Der Sturmer. College Republican rags were all the rage in the early 80's. It's how pundrix Laura Ingraham made her name at Dartmouth, by picking on a black professor. It was the training ground for the right, as much as the College Republicans.

If this is oppo and it reeks of it, the NRSC is now engaged in silent, deadly, nasty backstreet war with the Club for Growth folks. It isn't cheap to dig this shit up, and to use it against a Republican? They ran a crazy ad about illegals to use against Laffey, now this? Liddy Dole has declared war against Laffey in a way not even the bloggers used against Lieberman.

This is amazing. Oppo against a fellow Republican.