With a squeal-squeal here, and a peep-peep there...

Republicans have seized control of the debate over which farm animals can and cannot be used in Iowa's U.S. Senate campaign.

Pigs are OK. Feel free to use barrow without any guilt.

Chicks, however, are sexist. Cute, and fluffy, but sexist.

Democratic Senate candidate Bruce Braley learned this last week when he launched an attack ad against Republican Joni Ernst. The ad points to Ernst's famous pork-cutting 'Squeal” spot, charging that she really didn't say a 'peep” about spending cuts while serving in the state Senate. A baby chick does the peeping.

'In the state Senate, Ernst never sponsored a bill to cut pork. Never wrote one measure to slash spending. In fact, The Iowa Republican said she backed measures to actually increase spending,” the ad says.

When I first saw it, I thought the ad was lame and not terribly clever. It didn't occur to me that it was sexist. Others were more sensitive.

'Imagine if a GOP candidate had used a ‘chick' in an ad against a female opponent,” tweeted University of Iowa political scientist Tim Hagle. A spokeswoman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee called Braley 'tone-deaf, elitist and offensive.”

I imagine that if a GOP candidate had done this, Democrats would have been whipped into a politically correct lather. And I imagine that Republicans would have thought that outrage was cynically manufactured for political effect. And those Republicans would have been right.

I also imagine that people facing real, damaging sexism, the sort that throws up stubborn barriers and mars their daily lives, don't benefit much from wielding the same label in the interest of winning a news cycle or two. Is sexism cheapened by leaping at peeping? Take it away, Carrie Bradshaw.

But the chick wasn't Braley's only problem. The Gazette/KCRG-TV9 fact-checked Braley's ad and found it to be 'mostly false.” It was a the phrase 'never sponsored” that got him into trouble.

Fact-checkers

found four bills Ernst sponsored intended to reduce spending: requiring a cost-benefit analysis before building rest areas, drug-testing welfare recipients, freezing state hiring and barring undocumented immigrants from accessing state aid programs. True enough, although, in all four cases, Ernst was among anywhere from 18 to 24 co-sponsors. So her role may have amounted to little more than signing on to a sponsor list. Had Braley used the term 'never led” or something like that, he would have been on firmer ground.

And in the current Senate race, Ernst has yet to detail who exactly she'd make squeal when it comes to the federal budget. She told our editorial board last month that she favors a constitutional balanced budget amendment, but didn't say much about what she'd cut, other than our old pals waste and fraud. Significant, but likely chicken feed in the scope of that nation's debt.

Social Security could be transformed into personal savings accounts for younger workers, Ernst said. There's waste in the defense budget, she said, but Ernst also opposes proposed cuts that would reduce the size of the military.

Braley's ham-handedness aside, Ernst shouldn't duck our need for some substance.

l Comments: (319) 398-8452; todd.dorman@thegazette.com