Back in high school policy debate, we frolicked when we were blessed with tabula rasa debate judges. The game was to link the opponents’ plan to setting off as many nuclear wars as possible. The team whose plan caused the fewest nuke wars, won.

The nuke war decision rule did not play with mom ‘n pop judges, for obvious reasons. But when the judges were wicked-smart debaters from college, it was a machismo test of how smart you were and how well you handled abstraction.

It strikes me that in this year’s U.S. midterm election, the tabula rasa strategy is gay pedophilia. Whether it’s Dems linking Republicans with Rep. Mark Foley, Pat Buchanan trying to link Hillary Clinton with NAMBLA, or George ‘Macaca’ Allen quoting scenes from Jim Webb’s novels out of context, the game now in U.S. politics is to find the shortest path to link your opponent with sodomizing children.

And it comes across as tawdry. Political insiders are basically running game-theoretical arguments on a lay electorate, hoping that disgust overrides implausibility — just as we once argued that even a tiny chance of a massive impact, nuke war, made it worth voting against the opponent. But we did it with a specialized audience. To the layman, who perceives these attacks as personal rather than ‘just politics,’ these wildly implausible links just don’t pass the smell test.