I’m sorry, I can resist this.

In 2010, Krystal Ball was a 28-year old, almost credential and experience free Democratic Party nominee for United States Congress in Virginia’s 1st congressional district in the 2010 election. She lost to Republican incumbent Rob Wittman. During the campaign, old photographs surfaced of Ball and her then-husband at a college Christmas party, showing her dressed as “bad Santa,” leading her husband, dressed as a reindeer, around S and M style by a leash, and sucking on his long, fake, phallic red nose.  Like this:

(By the way, I had mentioned this episode very briefly in 2010, and promptly forgot about. Ball is the one, as we say in the law, who “opened the door” again.)

Although she lost by a 2-1 margin, Ball made the rounds of various TV talk shows exploiting the salacious aspects of the photos (for this is what the programs were interested in) and playing the victim, arguing that the photos were used against her because she was a woman. The exposure, combined with the fact that she is physically attractive—this sexist standard doesn’t bother her, oddly— launched her current career as a pretty talking head, if not an especially enlightening one. (Naturally, she roams on MSNBC.)

Krystal was on Fox News yesterday whining yet again about her 2010 defeat and blaming it on the photos and a “double standard.” “I think that we should look at the example of Scott Brown,” she told a sympathetic Megyn Kelly. “He had pictures from the same age as those pictures of me, only he was completely naked, in the centerfold of a national magazine, and it was not even a bump in his campaign; in fact he has even said that it helped him a little bit in his campaign. And I’m not holding anything against Senator Scott Brown… that’s as it should be, in my view, because those kinds of things to me are not relevant to the campaign trail. And I do think there’s a double standard.”

Baloney.

1. Ball lost because she had little experience and no credentials except, ahem, a vagina. Her candidacy was cynical to begin with, and she would have still lost big if photos had surfaced of her conferring with Bertrand Russell and Plato.

2. When a candidate has nothing positive to run on but her gender, is only 28 and has to convince voters that she is wise, responsible and mature beyond her resume and years, yes, a photo of her acting ridiculous and salacious, whatever it is, will hurt. It lost her 12 votes or so; maybe more.

3. A photo of a male Congressional candidate sucking a phallus at a Christmas party would hurt an equivalent male candidate just as much, arguably more.

4. Scott Brown’s fold-out for pay is not comparable in any way. When he ran for the Senate and his modeling career surfaced, he was a veteran, a lawyer and had served six terms in the Massachusetts State Legislature: he had credentials besides his man-things.  Using a modeling gig when he was 22 to discredit him looked and was silly and desperate. Brown also refused to be embarrassed by the photos, in which he looked gooooood.

5. Dildo-nose photos are perhaps rather more likely to resonate when the dildo-sucker is named “Krystal Ball,” which sounds like a stripper monicker if ever I heard one. Did you ever consider that, Krystal?

There are many double standards, but the “Candidate For Congress Who Is Photographed Sucking The Phallic Red Nose Worn By Her Reindeer Attired Husband At A Christmas Party Principle,” or the CFCWIPSTPRNWBHRAHAACPP for short (a distant cousin of the “Naked Teacher Principle”), which holds that if a candidate for Congress has photos depicting the candidate sucking phallic reindeer noses and leering turn up on the web, that candidate cannot credibly protest when the public concludes that said candidate’s judgment may be faulty, is gender neutral.

Kelly was almost as absurd as Ball. “So often we forget that candidates for Congress have feelings,” she intoned sympathetically. NOW we are talking double standards. As for Ball, when she isn’t whining about imaginary double standards that cost her an election she was certain to lose  that she parlayed into a feminist commentator gig by crying foul over, she is taking cheap shots at Republicans on MSNBC. For example, she reported on Chris Christie’s announcement of his Presidential run using 14 driving metaphors and phrases, slyly alluding to the bridge closing scandal that all investigations have exonerated the Governor from complicity.

Somehow I don’t think Christie is going to seek solace from an anchor who reminds us that governors have feelings.

And when a photo surfaces of College Chris sucking a dildo on some guy’s nose, we’ll never see it on MSNBC, right, Krystal?