Presumptive GOP Presidential nominee John McCain's "go anywhere and do anything for votes" strategy reached its apex this week when he showed up at the annual Sturgis motorcycle rally in South Dakota and offered to pimp out his wife [1] in a topless beauty pageant.
As a biker, I'm insulted that McCain brought politics to the nation's largest, anything-goes, hell-raising bike rally.
As a husband who loves his spouse, I'm more insulted that he offered up [2] his wife as a candidate for the Miss Buffalo Chip Contest.
You gotta wonder how suggesting your wife should be in a beauty contest where the winner struts around stage with her hooters hanging out is going to sit with the rabid religious right that McCain needs if he has any shot at winning the Presidential election in November.
According to ESPN:
Buffalo Chip has a reputation for that sort of thing. It holds a Miss Buffalo Chip contest every night, which is essentially a topless beauty pageant. And occasionally bottomless, too. During a drenching rain Wednesday night, the contest broke up into smaller groups and one woman wound up dancing naked on a bar top. Her boyfriend/husband saw her and angrily dragged her away as she struggled to put her pants back on and muttered something about how, "It's only this one week a year."
Self-righteous evangelical ministers may lust after women and screw everything in sight but they do it behind closed doors. They don't suggest their wives should compete with 19-year-old hard bodies in a nudie beauty pageant.
We've seen lots of evidence that McCain's brain is fried: His inability to grasp elementary-level geography and his failure to remember who is or is not our enemy give us two glaring examples [3].
Cindy McCain has all the beauty that her millions can buy through cosmetic surgery and chemical injection but Sports Illustrated is not going to offer her a spot in the swimsuit issue and Hugh Hefner is not on the phone offering the centerfold in Playboy.
To make matters worse, she's a Republican woman. As an old Washington axiom used to say:
Republican men always marry Republican women but they date Democratic girls first to have a little fun.
Let's face it. The women of the GOP are not high on any red-blooded male's fantasy list, even when under the influence of drugs.
So what was McCain thinking? His aides say he was just making a joke. As we have documented in this column [4] before, McCain likes to make jokes about women, especially lesbians, as well as African-Americans, Hispanics and "gooks" (his favorite word for Asians). He called his wife [5] a "cunt," one of the most offensive words any man can direct towards a woman. He later tried to excuse his behavior by saying it had been a long day and he was tired.
Maybe he was tired Monday when he suggested his wife could be a contender for Miss Buffalo Chip: Which means he's also too tired to be President of the United States.