Oh, yeah, there was a real award waiting for Pink Visuals…
www.examiner.com/x-20994-Raleigh-Progressive-Examiner~y2009m9d16-Newt-and-the-Pink-Visual-Award-An-Opportunity-Lost
from www.examiner.com – When I was a student at UNC-Chapel Hill, chasing girls, smoking illicit natural substances, and wondering how many years I could string out my undergraduate experience before I ran into the inevitable brick wall of graduation and adult responsibilities, I spent some time perusing magazines of substance such as Playboy and Penthouse. I actually did read the articles — both regularly published interesting political and social material, though I thought Playboy’s taste in fiction was a bit too insular and exclusionary for my non-Upper East Side taste — but I did spend a substantial amount of time looking over the pictures. Those ladies were pretty.
It’s probably worth noting that my roommate, who actually had the Playboy subscription, forbid us to read the magazine, or even to open it, until we had successfully “found the bunny.” That exotic little chore involved sitting and staring at the cover for a length of time anywhere from a few moments to the better part of the afternoon, until we had found the small bunny logo hidden somewhere on the cover. Sometimes it was hidden in some nice lady’s bosom, sometimes on a G-string, sometimes in a more original location. As I remember, the most difficult one to find was in a cover shot of a lovely brunette dressed as a cop, although no cop I’ve ever seen displayed as splendid a chest as this one. Hefner and his merry band of photography gnomes had placed a tiny white bunny on the tip of her police whistle. Took us all day and a good part of the night to find it; at one point there were at least six of us, guys and girls alike, crouched over the magazine with our noses an inch from the cover, scanning every millimeter for that damn bunny. We found it, and another month of wonder and airbrushed skin was ours for the taking.
For a brief moment, our beloved former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, had a similar opportunity open to him. He could embrace the porn as his own; it was all laid out before him like a Beverly Hills ingenue who’d downed too much Chardonnay. Unfortunately, when news of Newt’s golden opportunity became public, instead of standing up like the red-blooded, clandestinely porn-swilling Americans who voted for him, he ran squealing off into the night, braying about “family values” and “inadvertent,” happenstance errors of the cosmos, like Jimmy Swaggart when his rowdy cousin Jerry Lee Lewis tried to get him to peek at naked women in the hoochie koochie tent. Undoubtedly, liberals were involved in Newt’s discomfiture.
Newt’s PAC, American Solutions for Winning the Future, voted to award its Entrepeneur of the Year award to a small California outfit, run by a Miss Crump-lookalike named Allison Vivas, called “Pink Visual.”
I am no porn connoisseur, but I know enough about the connotations of such a slogan to have at least a suspicion that something not family-friendly is afoot behind the doors of an establishment sporting that name. But obviously Newt, being pure as the driven snow and innocent of such matters, went tripping blindly into the maw of the lubricious skin industry without having a clue that Pink Visual distributes adult movies.
As in triple XXX. As in I can’t post any pics to illustrate the business. Dave McKenna of the not-work-safe Washington City Paper, reporting on the award, writes (without the occasional redacted vowel to keep the vicar safely confused): “Perhaps Newt was moved to give kudos after viewing such Vivas titles as An_l Devastation, Couples Sed_ce Teens, Br_zen And Unsh_ven, Double Pen_tration Tryouts, or, knowing the political visionary’s past, Wife Switch Vol_me 7. (I could type this stuff all day …)” Fortunately for my own discomfiture and the few shreds of my own remaining innocence, I can’t type any more of it, though Dave makes the most of the opportunity. Ugh. I don’t even know what some of that stuff means. Maybe I could ask Newt; after all, it is obviously award-winning material at his PAC.
Anyhow, Vivas’s PR flack, Brian Gross, took instant delight in circulating a letter sent to Pink Visual (come on, how could they not know?) by Joe Gaylord, a consultant for the Newter’s PAC. The September 9 letter read in part, “Newt’s Business Defense and Advisory Council” thinks you are just peachy and deserving of this all-American, Norman Rockwell-approved award in “recognition of the risks you take to create jobs and stimulate the economy.”
Stimulate. You know, you just can’t make some things up.
A photo of what Vivas could have taken home with her
had Newt not lost his nerve. Credit: Think Progress
The surreal moment continued, with Gaylord inviting Vivas to an “intimate” meet-and-greet with the Newtinator himself: “Newt would like to arrange a private dinner with you at the historic Capitol Hill Club on the evening of October 7, 2009 in Washington. You’ll dine privately with Newt at this exclusive venue and he’ll take the occasion to present you with your well deserved award and have your photo taken together.” Hmmm, thrills the likes of which the maven of “pink visuals” have likely never known, dinner with The Great One and a photo op, too. Wonder what photos Allison will choose to display next to her shot of her menage á Newt?
No Glitter, No Glory
Unfortunately, Newt and his personal money-generating machine didn’t have whatever it might have taken to stick with their award after being outed by Gross realizing the mistake they’d made. Americans Determined to Not Let Anyone See Them Drool Over Hustler, or whatever Newt calls his PAC, rescinded the invitation within hours of having their cover, uh, blown. PAC spokesman Dan Kotman, undoubtedly sounding as if he had just eaten a bagful of lemons, called McKenna to announce that someone else would get the award. Someone who makes sure their employees keep their clothes on at work, I would think. “We have notified Allison Vivas that the notice she received was sent by mistake,” Kotman told McKenna. “We regret the error.”
Far more than I regret the error, I regret to report. In fact, when I read the article in Think Progress that alerted me to the whole kerfuffle, I chortled throughout the rest of my work day. Great job, everyone!
It’s also worth noting that Newt’s PAC invited other businesses besides porn distributors to the gala award ceremony at the local Taco Bell, or whatever fine dining establishment Newt has in mind for the October chowdown. Jarvis Coffin of Burst Media also got an invitation, which he wrote about in the Huffington Post. Coffin takes all the fun out of the proceedings by noting that it’s illegal for Newt’s organization to send unsolicited faxes to businesses who have not entered into an “established business relationship” (EBR) with it. Coffin is not interested in pursuing legal options, he just enjoyed mocking Newt’s firm, and his plain-as-day presidential aspirations, on Huffington.
Backing Away from Opportunity
But, I think Newt missed a tremendous opportunity. We all know that the Republican Party has the vote of the average anal-retentive, teeth-grittingly pious, fire-and-brimstone, I-don’t-allow-porn-in-my-house-and-don’t-look-under-my-mattress conservative voter pretty much locked up. That’s about 10-12% of the American electorate. (They have a bit bigger impact on the poll numbers, because they are very good at storming the polls en masse with steam coming out of their ears, determined to vote those licentious Demoncrats out of office once and for all.) A nice chunk of the voting public, but not enough to really win anything, just enough to keep the rest of us on edge. Newt had a fabulous opportunity to reach out to a whole new bloc of voters: the unabashed porn consumer.
Yes, they’re mostly white males (Clarence Thomas notwithstanding), and a good number of them probably think of themselves as Republicans (or at least can’t stand that weenie N_gro college boy Barack Soetoro bin Obama). And most of them don’t vote. Most of them don’t do anything beside watch television, drink beer, express their inner gastric turmoil, and cuss. Had Newt decided “the hell with it!” and gone to dinner with Miss Glitter Britches regardless of the embarrassment involved, he would have won an entirely new swath of potential voters, some of whom might actually have rolled up their copies of Maxim to take with them to the polls on those critical Tuesdays just to celebrate the randy, ready-for-anything, steel-pantsed Gingrich and his willingness to embrace the dark side of American commercially marketed sexuality.
And he wouldn’t be risking the votes of the stiff-necked, overtly moralistic right-wingers already panting to vote for him and his minions. They’ve already proven their willingness, over and over and over again, to forgive, defend, and ignore the sexual transgressions of their cultural and political heroes. John Ensign is running for office in 2012, unashamed of either tagging his employee’s wife or convincing his parents to pay them off. Mark Sanford, the Argentinian Quail Hunter, is refusing to resign from office. Larry Craig is taking a wide stance for heterosexual family values, regardless of whose foot he did or did not molest in the men’s room. Former evangelist Ted Haggard has proudly denied ever using the meth or having the gay sex he repeatedly paid for (mostly), and is angling for a way to once again get in the pulpit. Mark Foley — well, okay, Foley’s political career is toast, but in defense of the unforgiving Republican voters, he actually admitted to being gay instead of denying it. (The Foley lesson: as long as you deny it, your supporters can also deny it, and everyone’s happy. Craig is the best example of this. He pled guilty to soliciting sex from an undercover cop, then pretended not to be a lawyer long enough to explain that he didn’t understand that guilty meant you actually did what they said you did. He is now denying soliciting anything, ever going to a men’s room, or having a foot. He will probably serve in the Senate until he’s older than Strom Thurmond.)
So Newt, what’s the down side? You go to dinner with Miss January, shrug off the criticism, say you had no idea that Pink Visual was anything but an ammunition store or a distributor of American flags or whatever will placate your crowd, and walk away secure in the knowledge that thousands of secretive porn addicts are now muttering your name with a new reverence that might pay dividends come election time. (Actually, Allison Vivas is a businesswoman, not a nude model, and can’t be expected to come to dinner with Newt wearing a thong, a topcoat of oil, and a seductive smile. I found a perfectly modest picture of her online; she is quite attractive, but I don’t have the rights to use the photo for this article, and the Google search for her name brought pictures up that I’d rather not have in my browser cache, thank you anyway. You can look if you want.)
Just think of it as voter outreach, Newt. It doesn’t even require roses, sitting through a Meryl Streep movie, or STD testing. Cheap!