Gramm, a senior economic adviser to John McCain's campaign staff, made his indelicate remarks during a July 9 interview in which he also claimed that current economic woes do not amount to a real, but rather a "mental recession." He later refused to apologize, and instead reiterated his previous comments.
Yesterday, Blumenthal countered with a full-frontal assault on Gramm's entire career, which he called a "massive heap of wreckage." Excoriating the Democrat for his role in the Enron scandal and other activities, Blumenthal then segues back in time into an exhumation of Gramm's pre-politics dabble with soft porn production.
"Before Gramm joined the Christian Coalition's Ralph Reed to call for the defunding of the NEA, before he attacked an opponent for taking money from a gay rights group, and before he was interviewed by the white supremacist Southern Partisan magazine, Gramm was an avidly active investor in soft-core pornography movies," Blumenthal wrote.
The year was 1973 and the movie was a low-budget softcore production titled "Truck Stop Women." According to Blumenthal, Gramm's brother-in-law enticed him into investing $15,000 in the production. The flick was oversold, however, and the brother-in-law returned the money, offering Gramm the opportunity to invest in a future production.
Eventually, Gramm invested $7500 in the sequel, a satire called "White House Madness" that featured nudity in the presidential mansion. The film tanked and Gramm never saw a dime from it, Blumenthal reports.
Though no salient connection is made between Gramm's abreviated career as an investor in soft smut and his subsequent political career, Blumenthal finds a common theme of failure.
"Like the rest of Gramm's endeavors, his soft-core porn career was a complete disaster," he writes.
