ONE of the strangest US Senate races in recent times took an even more bizarre turn yesterday when the Republican candidate published graphic sex scenes contained in novels written by his Democrat opponent.

The fiercely contested Senate race in Virginia, which could determine control of the chamber after the midterm elections next month, has been notable for the blunders made by the Republican incumbent, George Allen, particularly the description of his opponent’s dark-skinned aide as a “macaca”.

However, with less than two weeks until polling day, Mr Allen’s campaign yesterday released excerpts from novels written by James Webb, his opponent, including one depicting fellatio between a father and his young son.

“Some of Webb’s writings are very disturbing for a candidate hoping to represent the families of Virginians in the US Senate,” the Allen press release said. It accused Mr Webb of portraying women “as servile, subordinate and promiscuous” and assigning his female characters with “base negative characteristics”.

In one excerpt, taken from one of six novels that Mr Webb wrote between 1978 and 2001, a naked stripper slices a banana with her genitalia. In another, Mr Webb says of a fictional nurse at Bethesda Naval Hospital that she would be less of a “damn witch” if she had sex.

Accusations of misogyny will touch a raw nerve for Mr Webb, a former Marine, decorated Vietnam veteran and Secretary of the Navy under President Reagan. He switched to the Democrats over his opposition to the Iraq war.

Mr Webb, 60, has already come under fire for a 1979 magazine article he wrote entitled Women Can’t Fight, in which he called dormitories at the US Naval Academy “a horny woman’s dream”.

Mr Webb, several of whose novels have been bestsellers, said of the incestuous fellatio scene: “I actually saw this happen in a slum of Bangkok . . . a man placing his lips on his son’s private parts, OK?” He added, with a reference to the wife of Dick Cheney, the Vice-President: “I’m a serious writer. I mean, we can go and read Lynne Cheney’s lesbian love scenes if you want to. Would I put something in a novel that I wrote that I didn’t believe that I could live with in my life?” He said of Mr Allen: “It’s smear after smear.”

Only six months ago the Virginia race was widely expected to end in easy re-election for Mr Allen, a right-wing Republican and, until recently, a serious contender for his party’s presidential nomination in 2008.

But the “macaca” incident led to a rapid unravelling of his campaign, and reputation, in the late summer. He claimed that he had made up the term, but it is a racial slur used in French-speaking North Africa. His mother, Ettie Allen, was born in Tunis.

A magazine profile also fuelled allegations of Mr Allen’s racial insensitivity. It revealed that he had once displayed a Confederate flag on his living-room wall and a hangman’s noose on his desk.

Then Mr Allen reacted furiously to a reporter’s suggestion that his mother was Jewish. Days later his mother admitted that only one month earlier she had told her son that she was brought up as a Jew in Tunisia.

Soon afterwards, several former university acquaintances said that they had heard Mr Allen use the word “nigger” when he was a young man — a charge that he has denied.

Mr Webb was unable to deny that he, too, had used the “n-word” in his past.

In recent weeks, Mr Webb has pulled even, according to opinion polls. But the book excerpts could harm him in conservative Virginia.

• In a sign that the closing stretch of the campaign might be getting to President Bush, he called Jeff Lamberti, a Republican congressional candidate in Iowa, “Dave” several times during his speech.

  View the Michael J. Fox video at www.timesonline.co.uk/americas

  IS THIS WHY THEY SELL SO WELL?

  Lost Soldiers

  “A shirtless man walked toward them along a mud pathway. His muscles were young and hard, but his face was devastated with wrinkles. His eyes were so red that they appeared to be burned by fire. A naked boy ran happily toward him from a little plot of dirt. The man grabbed his young son in his arms, turned him upside down, and put the boy’s penis in his mouth.”

  Something to Die For

  “Fogarty. . . watch[ed] a naked young stripper do the splits over a banana. She stood back up, her face smiling proudly and her round breasts glistening from a spotlight in the dim bar, and left the banana on the bar, cut in four equal sections by the muscles of her vagina.”

  A Sense of Honour

  “She wasn’t bad looking, he mused again, staring at her thin frame. If she’d just get laid every now and then she’d mellow out and stop being such a damn witch.”

  “You wouldn’t have believed it, Swede. She just dropped her britches and lifted up her skirt and pissed like a man. Didn’t lose a drop, either. Not a drop.”

  Fields of Fire

  “He saw the invitation with every bouncing breast and curved hip . . . He was thirteen . . . She was fifteen . . . In a few moments she drew him to her and he murmured in his quiet voice, ‘I am still small’. ‘You are large enough,’ she answered. And he found he was.”

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