Today, in a moment that's bound to go down in Republican National Committee history as one of the most drunk-seeming sober moments of all time, RNC Chairman Reince Priebus dismissed the notion that the "war on women" is anything other than another myth perpetuated by Democrats. It's as fake as that other war everyone keeps talking about — the war on caterpillars. Really, RNC? Another awful analogy fail? Republicans cannot go a week without reminding America's high school English teachers that they did not pay attention in class.
During an interview with Bloomberg TV, Priebus said, of the perception that male lawmakers across the country seem to be devoting an inordinate amount of energy to limiting women's access to reproductive health services,
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. It's a fiction.
I'm sorry to report that Reince Priebus did not appear to be intoxicated at the time of the making of this analogy, as it sort of sounds like something a drunken asshole of a boyfriend would say in the middle of a 2 am argument outside of a bar.
Intrigued by Priebus' completely out-of-the-blue comparison, I wondered if maybe I was missing something and there was some great caterpillar war about which I've been ignorant. So I did some research. A quick goole search revealed that from 1912 until the 1970's, it was actually illegal to have a caterpillar in your yard in Seattle. But that's over now. Caterpillars are no longer rounded up into camps where they're forced to spend their days crawling up plants very slowly under the cruel, watchful eye of bird overseers. It's a new era, an era when caterpillars and humans can coexist and we've put all that "not in my backyard" business behind us.
At any rate, Reince Priebus, who bears the unfortunate distinction of being the human being bearing the name that most sounds like the name of a species of endangered caterpillar, has a point. It was the Democrats that forced conservatives in Idaho, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Georgia, Mississippi, Texas, Oklahoma, Ohio, Alaska, Wisconsin, and elsewhere to write legislation restricting access to abortion services. It was Demmycrats with their mind control powers who hypnotized California Republican Darrell Issa and forced him to hold that now-famous hearing about birth control that featured zero women on the panel. Liberals used witchcraft to magick Rush Limbaugh into calling Sandra Fluke a slut, and then forced the Republican candidates for President to offer only tepid condemnations of his words. It was DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz herself, actually, who dressed up in a very convincing Dave Albo disguise and gave a speech before the Virginia Assembly about how sad she was about not getting to have sex because of the "trans v" ultrasound bill. Pro-choice Democrats are to blame for the near-government shutdown over Planned Parenthood funding last year. And it's definitely the bleeding heart tax n' spenders who have tried to make it legal for a woman's husband or parents to interfere with her right to abortion.
Look what you've gone and made the Republicans do, Democrats. If you didn't want them to think you wanted them to legislatively fuck women, then you shouldn't have left the house dressed like that.
The Obama campaign has released a statement condemning Priebus' parallel between women and insects in the larval phase, saying, "Women are already abandoning the Republican Party in droves because of their antiquated positions on women's health and out-of-touch policies on the middle class. Reince Priebus' comments today only reinforce why women simply cannot trust Mitt Romney or other leading Republicans to stand up for them."
Unfortunately for Old Reince "The Caterpillar" Priebus and his inscrutable analogy, unlike caterpillars, women can smell bullshit. And vote.
Priebus says gender battle as fictional as caterpillar war [Bloomberg]