The picture below shows Mark Halperin's The Page before it was removed. Mary Landrieu is photoshopped to have sperm in her hair, based on a 1998 romantic comedy. It's a joke, I guess, but I don't get the joke.
Neither does Media Matters get the joke:
Maybe Halperin thought it was really clever to echo a scene from a late-90s romantic comedy, but it isn't. The image and all that it suggests -- yes, her hair is supposed to be held up by semen -- isn't supported by any facts provided by Halperin in his post. The page to which he links doesn't have anything to do with semen, romantic comedies, or hair gel. In fact, it's a statement from Sen. Mary Landrieu's (D-LA) Communications Director "on motion to proceed timing" on the Senate's health care reform bill.
In other words, it's part of a broader, sexist right-wing narrative that the U.S. Senator from Louisiana is, as Glenn Beck put it yesterday, "a high-class prostitute" engaged in "hookin'" -- all because she lobbied Senate leadership for expanded Medicaid funding for Louisiana in the Senate health care bill in what was characterized by the media as an exchange for her "yea" vote to proceed with floor debate on the bill.
Such political deals are routine, as far as I understand the game. But women who participate in them? They give blow jobs and end up with sperm in their hair which is very funny if you are a guy journalist with the emotional age of twelve.
That's not quite right, either. This whole trend is nastier than just adolescent humor, because it applies both the nudge-nudge-wink-wink (buying sex is just dandy) and the filthy-whore (selling sex is disgusting) ideas at the same time.