Joe Scarborough and the “pole” remark

Palmetto Scoop calls recent comments made by MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough about soon-to-be Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson’s wife a possible “Imus moment” for Scarborough. View the video here:

Transcript (via Palmetto):

SCARBOROUGH: Have you seen Fred Thompson’s wife?
CRAWFORD: Oh, yeah.
SCARBOROUGH: You think she thinks she works the pole?
CRAWFORD: That’s what a Hollywood career will do for you, I guess.
SCARBOROUGH: What do you mean?
CRAWFORD: You get wives like that.
SCARBOROUGH: I mean, look at that guy. God bless him, I love his voice. But I mean, you know. He ain’t Robert Redford in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”
CRAWFORD: Well I would like to see him back into politics because I think he’s a lousy actor.

For the record, here’s Fred Thompson and his wife:

Photo courtesy: AP/Kevin Wolf

The USA Today “On Politics” blog has a lengthy link round-up of blogger reactions and MSNBC’s response to it, in which MSNBC tries to put the remark in context. I say in context or out, it was out of line, but I long ago stopped caring about what Joe Scarborough had to say so his comment really doesn’t move me one way or the other. I’m sure he’ll try to ‘clarify’ it on tonight’s show, in any event.

A comment I do take issue with, however, is one made by one of the bloggers mentioned in that USA Today blog piece – liberal feminist blogger Taylor Marsh, a HuffPo favorite – who is using this occassion to point out how this “sure does tell the story of what Republicans think of women.”

Riiiiight. I mean, like we know for sure that liberal men would never ever say anything derogatory about women. Heck, for that matter, we know that liberal men respect women too much to cheat on their them by having a woman under half their age perform sexual favors on them in the Oral – oops, Oval Office, and they certainly wouldn’t dare sexually harass other women while governor of a state in our dear union, would they?

Just what does that say about “liberal men,” I wonder? In fact, what does that say about the liberal women who want to forget those little inconvienient facts?

Read more blogger reax to this story here.

On a much more pleasant note, here’s Fred Thompson “On The Issues.”

Something I wasn’t aware of: He supported McCain-Feingold “campaign finance reform.”