Have you seen this?

Or this?

Hmm.  Remember when poor Al Gore got slimed for reading The Red and the Black?  David Frum, for example:

Gore [probably] really did read it, and really did like it. And you can see how it speaks to him. Forced into a career he never wanted, obliged to dissimulate his feelings for crass advantage — he is Julien Sorel. At a party in Paris, Julien is introduced to the exiled Count Altamira, who has been sentenced to death for leading a liberal revolt in Spain. Julien admires him, wishes he could be more like him — but in the end decides to put career first. Who does that sound like?

Or, some letter printed in a paper in Syracuse:

Not long ago, a reporter asked Gore what book he had read most recently. The answer was Stendahl’s “The Red and the Black,” a 19th-century novel describing post-Napoleonic France of the 1830s. In it, a young man, longing to be another Napoleon, his lifelong idol, spends much energy climbing tall ladders into the bedrooms of his mistresses. His heart trembling, but determined nevertheless to see her or perish, he flings a handful of gravel against the shutter. No reply. He taps more loudly. “For pity’s sake, open the window! I must speak to you! I am wretched! Is your husband in town?” A hundred pages later he again climbs up a ladder, this time to the window of a 19 year-old virgin, whom he impregnates. About 700 pages of this.

Well, now we’re getting a taste of Republican literary tastes.  And they’re a little bit icky.  Apparently, in 1996 Sccoter Libby published a novel 20 years in the making— The Apprentice.  This may be a better reflection of Republican literary tastes.  According to an article in the new New Yorker, the novel contains some interesting bits:

Like his predecessors, Libby does not shy from the scatological. The narrative makes generous mention of lice, snot, drunkenness, bad breath, torture, urine, “turds,” armpits, arm hair, neck hair, pubic hair, pus, boils, and blood (regular and menstrual). One passage goes, “At length he walked around to the deer’s head and, reaching into his pants, struggled for a moment and then pulled out his penis. He began to piss in the snow just in front of the deer’s nostrils.”

And another:

“At age ten the madam put the child in a cage with a bear trained to couple with young girls so the girls would be frigid and not fall in love with their patrons. They fed her through the bars and aroused the bear with a stick when it seemed to lose interest. “

At least it’s not French.

(via M. Berube, and Shakespeare’s Sister)