Friday, April 6, 2012

Don’t Bug Me

War on women? Pish-posh!

The leaders of the two political parties clashed over the role of gender in U.S. elections, with the Democrat saying her opponents have been “shockingly out of touch” on women’s issues and the Republican saying Democrats and the media have created a phony conflict.

“If the Democrats said we had a war on caterpillars and every mainstream media outlet talked about the fact that Republicans have a war on caterpillars, then we’d have problems with caterpillars,” Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital with Al Hunt” airing this weekend. “It’s a fiction.”

Yeah, not only is the comparison of women to bugs insulting, it’s worse that Mr. Priebus can look at all the moves the GOP has made against women through the various laws aimed at their reproductive rights — up to and including state-sanctioned rape with a medical procedure — and dismiss it all as “a fiction.” That means he either really doesn’t get it, or it really doesn’t matter: women need to be sheltered from the harsh reality of politics, and they can’t be trusted to make the right choices. Leave that to the menfolk.

It’s like they really want to lose.