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It was a coincidence that Fat Tuesday and Super Tuesday fell on the same day this year, but it calls to mind the inextricable link between sex and politics in our country, where they both tie into power, particularly its excesses and abuse. For a moment, forget about that Lewinsky gal. The Christian right still preaches abstinence over abortion. Hillary Clinton has been criticized that her sex will prevent her from being an effective leader. Barack Obama garnered millions of YouTube hits centered on a sexy girl having a crush on him, his name blazoned across her underwear. Fred Thompson and Dennis Kucinich got way too much attention for their sexy wives rather than their political agendas. Politics is sexy, and it's been especially sexy this election year.

So it's appropriate that writer Stephen Elliott (author of the 2004 campaign-trail memoir Looking Forward to It) has edited a collection of short stories, Sex for America: Politically Inspired Erotica, that all look for "the intersection of our desires and our political beliefs." Popular fiction writers like Rick Moody, Jami Attenberg, Jonathan Ames and James Frey (who will forever wear the Oprah hair shirt for the pseudo-memoir A Million Little Pieces) all contribute, but it's author Jerry Stahl who provides the most memorable sordid tale -- a take on Dick Cheney's hunting accident that will have you never looking at the vice president with a straight face again. "You see, there's another side to 'Li'l Dickens,' as the VP liked to refer to himself," Stahl notes in his story.

But the stories don't all aim for political humor by way of fetishizing politicians. Most have a strong political message themselves, hidden beneath the climaxes and dirty talk. As Mistress Morgana, a dominatrix and sex educator, explains in her piece, "An Open Letter to the Bush Adminstration," our current government is "taking the fantasy out of torture and domination and making it real, which is triggering that annoying consumer conscience and driving away my clients.... [Their] policies have stripped the sexiness out of being inescapably imprisoned for no reason and with no due process." Through the lens of someone working to "punish you before you've been bad," the sense of how sadistic our government has been in the last eight years comes through with force.