Paul R. Nelson defends sleazy ad about funding sex studies...when nobody else will

Republican U.S. congressional candidate Paul R. Nelson defended a controversial Internet ad Wednesday, while another GOP leader called it “below the belt.”

Late Tuesday, Gary Arneson, chairman of the 3rd Congressional District GOP, contacted the Tribune with a statement on Nelson’s ad.

“I disapprove of Paul Nelson’s controversial ad. No one wants to replace Ron Kind more than I do. But to say Ron Kind pays for sex is below the belt and unbecoming of a Republican candidate for Congress,” Arneson said. “I disagree with Ron Kind, but even he doesn’t deserve that. Ron is a politician, and he can take it. But his young boys should not have to hear such insinuations and now they have.”

It is an ad, Nelson boasts, that "the mainstream media won't show!"

And for obvious reasons.

"Ron Kind," the ad continues, "even spent your tax dollars to pay teenage girls to watch pornographic movies with probes connected to their genitalia. Ron Kind pays for sex but not for soldiers."

Nelson's ad so irked state Republican leaders that it merited a call last week from Wisconsin Republican Party Executive Director Rick Wiley to Kind's campaign manager, Matt Sweeney, in which, Kind said, Wiley took pains to "denounce" it.

Wiley acknowledged Monday that he called Sweeney about the advertisement last week but said the discussion was "off the record." He said he called Sweeney only to weigh in on what he thought about it.

So what does he think about it?

"It's not a good ad. There is no doubt about it," Wiley said. "(Nelson) would be better served if he sticks to the issues out there that folks want to hear about."

"...fortunately, some leaders in the Republican Party have chosen to turn their backs on Paul. This is the kind of weak-kneed leadership that grass-roots activists have been complaining about," Muller said.

Nelson said he recently got a call from Wiley.

"Mr. Wiley expressed his unhappiness with us," Nelson said. "We told him we thought the ad accurately depicts the shameful, deplorable waste of government dollars that we say it does."

Nelson said he did not conceive the ad. In fact, it originally wasn't even his; the advertisement was put together for a congressional hopeful in North Carolina. Nelson said he paid its producer something less than $5,000 to fashion it to target Kind.

"Most voters don't believe this actually happened. They think, at best, this was buried in some large appropriations bill," Nelson said. "This is not the case. (Kind) voted . . . in the middle of the day on a roll call vote . . . They were voting specifically on these (National Institutes of Health) studies."

That vote, according to the non-partisan Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, was on a failed Republican-sponsored amendment in July 2003 to deny funding for five research grants for studies that "had such stated goals as slowing the spread of AIDS, understanding homosexuality and improving the lives of senior citizens as their sexual function declines."

The measure failed 210-212.

As for the teen girls referenced in the ad, "this grant actually proposed to study sexual arousal in 180 lesbian, bisexual and heterosexual 'women' and makes no mention of 'teenage girls' as test subjects as the ad claims," according to the center.

The Annenberg Center reviewed the version of the ad launched by North Carolina Republican hopeful Vernon Robinson. Nelson recycled the same ad, with some minor tweaks.

It's one thing to run a dirty campaign. That just shows the desperation of this campaign. Theyre willing to go to any extreme. It's apparently quite another to run one so dirty it rates an XXX.

Republican challenger and political newcomer Paul R. Nelson has taken his race against five-term U.S. Rep. Ron Kind (D-La Crosse) to apparently new territory in Wisconsin politics. Consider his latest video advertisement, which is so far too lewd to find a home on television in western Wisconsin's 3rd Congressional District.

When asked how the ad ties together truth and reality, Nelson said: "There is an enormous disconnect between the way American families live their lives and what goes on in Washington, D.C."

On a related matter to sex and teenagers, former Florida Congressman Mark Foley said,"The Adam Walsh Act is the most comprehensive piece of child protection legislation this Congress has ever considered. The bill creates, among other things, new State and Federal regulations, community notification requirements, as well as new Federal criminal penalties for sex offenders."

Foley added, ""It's more sad than anything else, to see someone with such potential throw it all down the drain because of a sexual addiction."



When asked for a comment as to whether or not the Republican Party is God's Party, James Dobson said, "As it turns out, Mr. Foley has had illicit sex with no one that we know of, and the whole thing turned out to be what some people are now saying was a -- sort of a joke by the boy and some of the other pages."