Kay Bailey Hutchison Is A Whore

At least, that's what one Republican adviser seems to think. The comment came in an article about Senator Hutchison's upcoming challenge to current Texas Governor Rick Perry in next year's gubernatorial primary. Hutchison and Perry are both Republicans, but our girl Kay is apparently one of those moderate Republicans that the right-wingers hate so much. Since Texas is Republican-dominated and the primaries tend to draw lots of Christian conservatives and others who are pretty far right, Hutchison is trying to improve her chances by emphasizing economic rather than social issues and going for the more centrist 'big tent' thing to increase turnout and bring in some new voters. Like a big old whore.

Hutchison's political team believes its campaign would benefit from a higher turnout and is targeting center-right voters, including suburban women and economic conservatives.

"What Hutchison is saying is that what most of us are looking for is a party that has core fiscal principles – Republican principles that include people who may or may not agree on the social issues," said Rich Galen, a GOP political consultant and one-time Hutchison adviser.

Hutchison supports embryonic stem cell research and abortion rights, though she backs restrictions on abortion such as a ban on federal funding for organizations that perform abortion and a ban on late-term procedures.

Perry political consultant Dave Carney said the Republican governor agrees the party should welcome new voters.

"But that doesn't mean you take your principles and throw them out the door and become a whorehouse and let anybody in who wants to come in, regardless," Carney said. [The Dallas Morning News via Think Progress]

Actually, Mr. Carney, whorehouses don't let in anybody who wants to come in. You have to be able to afford it, and in that sense it's pretty similar to the GOP, right?

Okay, dumb sarcasm aside, isn't a comment like that a pretty clear message to Republican women, and to center-right voters in general? He didn't choose to use the "whorehouse" comparison randomly or by accident. Something tells me he wouldn't have gone with that term if Kay Bailey Hutchison was conservative on every issue except, say, the environment or gun control. It's all about those evil slutty pro-choicers. It's very selfish of Hutchison to try to reach out to moderates or economic conservative/social liberal types, because then more pro-choice people might sneak in and that will surely mean the death of a party that is riding such a massive wave of popularity right now, with "whorehouse" being the natural conclusion, because if pro-choice people lack principles, then sex workers can only be the pure embodiment of immorality and depravity.

A group of Republican women in Texas have written a letter asking that Governor Perry apologize and repudiate his adviser's remarks, but the response from Perry campaign spokesman Mark Miner was just this: "Dave Carney, a national political consultant and former White House Political Director, was commenting on a story concerning the state of the national Republican Party. He was not commenting on the 2010 Texas Governor's race and does not speak for the Governor."

I am curious, though. Where's the GOP's Sarah Palin Sexism Squad on this one? It seemed like so many Republicans discovered a deep passion for calling out sexism sometime around August of last year, so I'm surprised they weren't all over this one. Bill O'Reilly became such an anti-sexism crusader that he started taking feminists to task for not defending Palin enough, so I'm confident that he'll be sensitive to the concerns of the Republican women who are speaking out against this "whorehouse" analogy. And Palin herself, who has already given Rick Perry her endorsement, expressed surprise about the sexism she faced on the national stage after her arrival from the sexism-free state of Alaska. (Of course, she's dangerously delusional about that, but we'll go with it for the moment because it's what she claims to believe.) So I'm sure that she'll give her good friend Rick a call and explain to him how important it is to repudiate such unnecessary and potentially offensive comments when they come from his advisers. We can all just sit this one out and let the people who really know about sexism handle everything.