You know, when we say political candidates sling crap while campaigning, we didn’t really mean it literally — until now.  Forget Demon Sheep and Aqua Buddha; Joe Sestak has eclipsed the weirdness factor in campaign advertising, and the taste barrier as well.  In his latest television ad, Sestak uses the most unusual prop ever (via Gateway Pundit):

Perhaps this is intended to make us long for the days when candidates only threw mud in the final days of a race.

Something smells in this attack ad, too, and it’s not the droppings of Sestak’s pooch.  Sestak is smearing Toomey as the reason for the financial collapse, but it was Joe Sestak who was in Congress from January 2007 forward; Toomey had left Congress two sessions earlier.  Did he do anything to intervene in the Fannie/Freddie debacle before it imploded and nearly took the global financial system with it?  Or did he follow the lead of Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, and Chris Dodd in pushing for further government interventions in the mortgage markets to expand housing, which was the actual cause of the bubble and subsequent collapse?

As I have written on many occasions, Republicans deserve a share of the blame for buying into the government-intervention, social-engineering policies that started in 1998 and created the inevitable collapse in 2008.  There is nothing that indicts Toomey in that process, though.  Toomey was one of the few voices of fiscal responsibility in Congress that went unheeded by both parties.  Had Congress had a substantial caucus of Pat Toomeys instead of K Street Republicans and social-engineering Democrats in those years, this collapse would never have happened at all.

Attempting to pin the blame for the failure of the government-intervention model that created a financial meltdown on Toomey isn’t just misinformed — it’s misleading crap, and Sestak’s ad is ironically revealing.