Punished for poking?

Titillating news from Malaysia (the country that managed to steal its flag from both America and Turkey”):

Anwar Ibrahim, the leader of the Malaysia’s main opposition party, has been accused of “coalition-building” on the “wrong side of the Parliamentary aisle,” if you know what I mean.  You don’t know what I mean?  Oh.  Well, let’s just say it has been suggested that Ibrahim’s “progressive policies” are “encouraging ethnic diversity” and “increasing government transparency.”  Still nothing?  OK, OK.  How about this:  A 23 year-old male aide  accused Anwar of putting his “penis” in his “butt.”  Sodomy!

In America, such an accusation would merely make Ibrahim a prominent, if reluctant, member of our burgeoning Malaysian LGBT community.  But in the largely Islamic state of Malaysia, where sodomy is decried as “carnal intercourse against the order of nature”,  it makes him a criminal.  In fact, Anwar already spent six years in prison on a sodomy charge that was later reversed.  Most people believe that the charge was manufactured by governing party officials to silence one of their most active critics.

But what about today’s claim?  Is Anwar the Malaysian Eliot Spitzer, committing political suicide by obliviously chasing a sweet, sweet piece of ass as it leaps off a giant cliff?  Or is this simply another case of gay-baiting by the governing party?  Signs point to the latter, though you have to give it up to the governing party of Malaysia for having the guts to go with the old sodomy charge in an age where a video of two girls eating their own shit is now a pop cultural touchstone here in the States.

But I can’t help imagining how much more interesting our own presidential elections would be if unfounded charges of sodomy were an accepted way to discredit a political opponent.  Instead of a lame parade of boring speeches and middle-of-the-road policies aimed at a tiny sliver of undecided voters in swing states, the election would become a raucous competition between Barack Obama and John McCain to see who could rally the most people willing to accuse their opponent of sodomizing them.  All states would be “in play” so long as you could drum up a few citizens willing to look sternly into a camera, point at their butthole, point at a picture of John McCain, and give a slow, meaningful nod.

The nightly news would be full of running tallies of the sodomized; the race would be handicapped based on each campaigns’ ability to organize sodomizees in a visible and convincing way; instead of those lame campaign ads where normal Americans talk about the merits of their candidate, we would have choruses of alleged victims carefully recounting how Obama stripped them naked, led them–dozens at a time–to his snow-covered backwoods cabin, and sodomized them.

I’m not saying a sodomizing-accusing contest would be necessarily be a better way to pick our president than today’s electoral system.  I’m only saying it would be different and more awesome.