KK not around but Slick Nick takes on the political babe gig

This is an excerpt from Nick's column found here:

http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentary/101193564.html?elr=KArksc8P:Pc:Ug8P:Pc:UiD3aPc:_Yyc:aULPQL7PQLanchO7DiUr

"The summer is coming quickly to an end, but not quickly enough. Summer is the silly season in politics, and Minnesotans are being exposed this month to a clown-car full of silliness that makes us long for Labor Day, the resumption of school, and the more substantive and serious political discussions we need to have before election day.

What can you do, for example, with the frat-boy video posted on the Internet by some of the fun-loving guys in the Minnesota Republican Party that made the claim that Republican women are hot babes while Democratic women are dogs?

The video (which has been removed from the website of the Senate District 56 GOP in Lake Elmo) was denounced by all the usual suspects on all sides of the political divide, repudiated in such muscular terms that it would be understandable now if someone got the mistaken impression that Republicans have abandoned any claim that GOP women are attractive and admit they are just as unappealing as Janet Reno.

Just to be clear, that is not what the Republicans are saying. Ever since Mamie Eisenhower and Barbara Bush, however, the Republicans have seemed a bit defensive about the women in their party. Take Tim Pawlenty: The governor is married to "a red-hot smoking wife," he has said, which is the kind of crack that might get a Democrat a wife who would just be hot under the collar. And Sarah Palin? Her handlers apparently worried so much that she wasn't smokin' hot enough for prime time after McCain picked her as her running mate in 2008 that the first thing they did was take her on a prettification tour of Macy's, to the tune of $150,000.

But there is nothing new about the grating and drooling GOP video, which mimicked a lot of dorm room posters. The 90th anniversary of women's suffrage, Women's Equality Day, will be observed Thursday, but sexists have never stopped barraging women with messages saying they are needed at home too much to vote and they are too gosh darn cute to worry their pretty little heads about politics.

Women in politics have always been stereotyped: Hatchet-faced suffragettes, mannish policy wonks, bra-burning harpies: From Susan B. Anthony to Eleanor Roosevelt to Bella Abzug, Hilary Clinton and Elena Kagan. Many of the history-making women over the past century have been Democrats because, with the great exceptions of slavery and Civil Rights, the Democrats have been at the forefront of social and cultural change. A lot of people don't like that, especially in the ranks of conservatives uncomfortable still with the role of women in the national discussion.

Here is Ann Coulter -- one of the right's favorite hotties, who says she has never met an attractive liberal woman -- on the subject of women and voting:

"It would be a much better country if women did not vote. That is simply a fact. In fact, in every presidential election since 1950 -- except Goldwater in '64 -- the Republican would have won if only the men had voted."

Yes, and if women didn't vote, it would make the United States just like ... Saudi Arabia. Go back to the kitchen, Ms. Coulter, and cover your pretty little head.

Actually, men also voted (by a slim margin) for Barack Obama in 2008, so Coulter's bombast is out of date. But the part that really makes many women ugly to Republicans is that most women usually vote for the other side. In the last presidential election, women split 56-43 for Obama over the GOP candidate, John McCain. And single women -- the unmarried, divorced, separated and widowed -- went overwhelmingly for the Democrat, 70 percent to 29 percent.

That's why radio bully Rush Limbaugh rails against "feminazis" and seems to long for the day when gentlemen smoked cigars after the women retired to the kitchen so the guys could discuss politics and sate their oral fixations.

I almost feel sorry for the Minnesota doofuses -- one of them unfortunately named Randy -- who posted the hot Republican babes video when, in their own words, they are perplexed by the fact that more women vote than men and "the startling fact is that more than 75 percent of them vote Democrat!"

Gosh, fellas, I've got a great idea: In our quest to get more babes to vote for us, let's put up a video that shows that any chick who votes for a Democrat is an ugly man-hater.

The bottom line is that one of our political parties has a problem with women.

But it isn't the Democrats.

They have most of the women, and, for their candidates, that's a beautiful thing.