This perfect combination of nepotism as well as sort of 21st century republican echo chamber. because rand paul acts as though his every utterance is brilliant. and he is going to come at this in a way that mike huckabee didn t get it rite. but he is going to give it a shot. he is going to say something really profound that is going to move the debate forward and help republicans. and it s just as stupid in a different way than what huckabee said. jess, i m not finished with his pro fundties. he also talked about possibly cutting government benefits for single mothers with several children. he said, and i m quoting, maybe we have to say enough is enough. you shouldn t being having kids after a certain amount. i don t know how you do all that because then it s tough to tell a woman with four kids that she s got a fifth child, we re not going to give her any more money. but we have to figure out how to get that message through because that is part of the answer.
Now here is how the senator defended those comments over the weekend. it s kind of tricky to say exactly what i did say. i didn t come up with a policy prescription. i would say i mused about what are we going to do and does government have a role in it. and i concluded by saying it s a community, it s a religious, it s a personal problem. but it is a problem. and i mused about how you would have a government policy, but actually came down saying it would be very difficult to have a government policy. so, jess, your reaction to his musings? personally, i prefer offensive musing to offensive policy. but i am, in fact, still offended. i think there is a strain in the republican party that comes across as really quite heartless. and telling a woman that, you know, you don t believe that her birth control ought to be covered by insurance and you don t think she ought to have access to that, and also, you don t think that single moms
Remember back then. live wall to wall. i don t know what he was doing back in the late 90s. i don t really want to venture to say. but there was wall to wall coverage. he got no pass. maybe even worse is the entitlement that is required to suggest that women are winning the war on women because, quote, my family, the women in my family are doing great. women in many families are not doing great. two out of three adults in poverty are women. two out of three minimum wage workers are women. to extrapolate from your own privileged family, it s just the essence of privilege and entitlement. it s wrong. but going to policy, jess, since you brought it up, when senate republicans blocked an equal pay bill, something that i referred to and jones has referred to, senator paul con paired it to a soviet policy. he said, quote, in the soviet union, the politburo decided the price of bread. and they either had no bread or
Blamed or for that matter any woman get blamed for the behavior of her husband? i mean, i m missing something here. no you re not missing anything. it s so offensive, reverend al. it s hard for us to really take it. in and we do wind up thinking what was he really saying? you say libido. i say lewinsky. and between the two of them, they re idiots when it comes to women. jess is exactly right. it s not about rhetoric, although rhetoric matters. it s also about a world view. this man has the audacity to think he is reaching out to women by insulting a woman over her husband s choices. she has a long track record. she is an eminently qualified woman, but he is insulting her over her husband s choices. choices that he was impeached for, by the way, and she suffered going through all of that. i mean, this is absolutely offensive. she has been through hell. she was put through hell. the media did not give him a pass there was wall to wall coverage, if you re old to
Too much bread. so setting prices or wages by the government is always a bad idea. so, i mean, this is the policy that rand paul is saying. he is comparing this to the soviets to deal with equal pay for women. the communists are bad at selling bread. and so women shouldn t earn as much as men. it makes perfect sense to me. i don t know what everybody else is having a problem with. i knew it was me, jess. i knew it was me. i knew it was me. it s just absolutely tone deaf, and arrogantly so when it comes to women, joan. it really is. i mean, the idea that it s not that the paycheck fairness act does not set wages. it does not have the government set wages. i don t know if he is stupid or if he is deliberately misstating what it does. maybe he really doesn t know what it would have done. maybe he doesn t pay close enough attention to what it would have done. but, again, it s this entitlement and it s this tin ear. he s always got he is like