The More You Attack Ashley Judd, the Stronger Her Campaign Looks

I think it's settled: The Daily Caller is a publication run by a bunch of people who just discovered yesterday that sex exists, and they cannot get over how disgusted they are by the entire thing. I'm not giving them a link, but Alyssa Rosenberg at Think Progress calls them out for running an article shaming Ashley Judd---who is considering a run as Kentucky's Senator against a vulnerable Mitch McConnell---for being in films with nudity.

We are used to knowing just about everything there is to know about serious political candidates. But will Judd be the first potential senator who has — literally — nothing left to show us? The actress has bared her breasts in several films and has had some raunchy sex scenes in others. According to MrSkin.com, which bills itself as “the largest free nude celebrity movie archive,” Judd has flashed just about everything on-screen. It seems like she was particularly liberal with nudity early on in her career…Judd did a lesbian sex scene in 2002′s Oscar-nominated “Frida” and has nine other films categorized as “sexy” by Mr. Skin, meaning that there is at least one racy scene in those films.

What's funny here is that, by reasonable human standards, it's exponentially less shameful to have been nude in a movie than to go to a website dedicated to obsessively collecting nude scenes in movies. The former says, "Hey, I'm comfortable with my body and willing to go the distance for my art." The latter says, "I'm still struggling to understand that women are naked under their clothes, and thus need a great deal of proof that the very same woman I've seen clothed can also be naked sometimes."

But clearly, The Daily Caller's staff does struggle to understand the simple mechanics of clothing vs. nudity, because the premise of this slut-shaming horseshit is that it's normal to assume that because you haven't seen the rest of the Senate naked, then it's safe to assume they're without genitals or secondary sex characteristics. Otherwise, there's no evidence that Judd's nudity is movies is another level of "everything there is to know" about candidates. I already knew that they have butts and genitals and breasts under their clothes. That the Daily Caller only really believes it if you get naked doesn't say much about Judd, but it does say a lot about them.

The Daily Caller has attempted to save face over the weird reveal that don't know if everyone is naked under their clothes by calling this article "entertainment". It is entertaining, I will give them that. This isn't even close to the Democratic tittering over Scott Brown's Cosmo centerfold, because as far as I know, no one framed it as new-and-revealing information that Brown has a body under there. It was mostly a focus on the silliness of it, given that Cosmo isn't even trying to be art like most of Judd's movies are.

By the way, as Asawin Suebsaeng points out, Scott Brown's centerfold gives lie to the claim that this is the first time we've had a sentatorial candidate that is demonstrably naked under their clothes. I mean, we can't prove for certain from the photographic evidence that Brown has a penis, but the overall nakedness does suggest---and I know that the folks at Daily Caller are in utter shock over this---that he has a body under those clothes that looks like a naked one, and so we can probably assume the penis is there. But in case there's any doubt that Ashley Judd is not the First Known Politician To Have Genitals, I will point out that there's pictures of Arnold Schwarzenegger hanging dong out there. I'm not 100% sure of their veracity, but I remember seeing them in high school, so if they're fake, it's by someone who knew what they were doing before Photoshop. But they're probably not fake, since he was pretty free about this stuff back in the day.

Long story short: The amount of panic displayed by conservatives at the mere thought of Ashley Judd's run should be evidence enough that they really do think she has a chance. She should run, and see what comes of it.