Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh make deeply offensive comments on a near-daily basis on their respective radio programs. Mostly, I don't feel the need to draw attention to them. But yesterday both men crossed into completely unacceptable territory. Followers of the health-care debate will know that Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu is high on the list of moderate Democrats who may ultimately vote against the bill. On Saturday, she was the second-to-last senator to lend her vote to a motion to open debate on the bill. Part of her motivation to consent came form a concession she successfully extracted from leadership $300 million to plug a gaping hole in Louisiana's budget, a state still suffering in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the botched emergency response to that crisis. The formula that determines federal Medicaid funding counted one-time post-Katrina aid to Louisiana as an increase in household income, thus causing the budget shortfall. The funds will help cover medical costs for the poor and uninsured, which, in part thanks to Katrina, Louisiana has in spades. Landrieu says that Louisiana's Republican Governor Bobby Jindal had explicitly asked her to pursue these funds. Sources on Capitol Hill confirm that Jindal had been pressuring Landrieu on the issue for months.
Such a deal shouldn't be a surprise. Like it or not, it's routine practice on Capitol Hill to trade your vote for something that helps your state. That's just the cost of doing business in D.C. And yet Landrieu's actions prompted Beck and Limbaugh to call her a prostitute. Beck likened her to a high-class hooker, saying, "She may be easy, but she ain't cheap." Limbaugh dubbed her "the most expensive prostitute in the history of prostitutes." (Keep in mind though, that Landrieu still hasn't committed to voting for final passage of the health-care bill. She's openly declared that she still has reservations about the bill. Saturday's vote was simply about opening debate.)
The Louisiana Democratic Party gleefully pounced, sniffing an opportunity to bring up the sordid history of Landrieu's Republican counterpart, David Vitter, who was embroiled in the D.C. Madam prostitution scandal a few years back. They're asking him denounce the comments, because he knows a thing or two about hookers—get it? Nudge, nudge, chortle, chortle.
The Louisiana Dems response is a disappointing one, because in their eagerness to score a few cheap political points, they've managed to trivialize the real offense here, namely that Landrieu is being denigrated in a way that her male counterparts wouldn't be. If it were Ben Nelson swapping his vote for some goodies for his state, would anyone sexualize that trade? When Louisiana Rep. Joseph Cao became the sole Republican to support the Nancy Pelosi's health-care-reform bill in the House—just one day after he introduced a bill that would cover his state's Medicaid gap and reportedly received assurances from the president that the administration would work on the funding—I didn't hear anyone accusing him of being a whore.
Of course I'm aware that neither radio host is suggesting that Landrieu actually traded sex for $300 million. I get that it's a metaphor. But its a misogynist one that never gets applied to male senators. It works by making her political capacity a function of her gender, and then marginalizing that gender by reducing her legitimate actions to a mutually exploitative sexual transaction. That's not something men in politics get accused of when they bargain on behalf of their underprivileged constituents. I'd expect that sort of thing from Fred "it's like watching a dog play the piano" Rumsen in Mad Men—except that's a fictional account of four-decade old chauvinism. Sometimes I feel like the Sterling Cooper boys' club just moved onto talk radio.
The whole episode leaves me wondering what the Beck/Limbaugh response would be if Keith Olbermann had called Sarah Palin a prostitute for bargaining with the Feds to get much needed dollars for her state.
