Hard-core Politics, Soft-core Porn?

What is it with the conservative political operatives and their penchant for writing really awful quasi-erotic novels? The latest to be outed as a low-rent DH Lawrence is none other than "Scooter" Libby, who wrote a novel called The Apprentice: A Novel back in 2002. According to CNN:

Now out of print, the novel tells the story of an innkeeper apprentice in a bizarre coming-of-age story set in Japan in 1903. It is littered with edgy sexual material and strong language.

'Wow, who would have thought that clean living, family values man Scooter Libby was capable of writing such filth,' said one reviewer on Amazon. Another Amazon reviewer noted its 'lavish dollops of voyeurism, bestiality, pedophilia and corpse robbery.'

Wow - now we know where Cheney's torture ideas come from! Libby is hardly the first winger to dip his, um, toe, into the area of cheesy erotica. Let us not forget Bill O'Reilly's Those Who Trespass (a "novel of television and murder").