The GOP Search for a Normal Woman

It came as no surprise to me to hear that the GOP had chosen Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington State to rebut President Obama's State of the Union.  They have made it clear that they are sincere about proving to women that, well, there are Republican women.  It also came as no surprise that they had chosen a women that pretty much nobody had heard of.  After all, this is the bunch that delivered us Sarah Palin in 2008, and we are all appreciative of that choice.  The GOP could have had another comedic coup had they chosen Michele Bachmann in 2011, but they went and let her represent the Tea Party rebuttal:

Sadly, we all were so focused on the fact that her eyes were trained, in the distance, on those aliens that only she can see that we missed her sincerely spoken words of Tea Party misinformation.  I can only imagine whoever was running the GOP into the ground back then sighing with relief that instead they had gone with male robot Paul Ryan.

But the election of 2012 caused the Republican party leadership to reconsider.  With the words of Todd Aiken and his subsequent loss still stinging, leaders like Bobby Jindal of Louisiana urged his fellow republicans to stop being "the stupid party."  By this he meant, of course, that they should stop letting the American people know what they really think.  As we have seen since then, those old white men continue to loudly fault the poor for their poverty, the undereducated for their lack of success, and women for their menstrual cycles.

What to do, what to do?  The problem being that since nothing is going to convince these guys that they might be wrong, they have apparently come to the conclusion that if women were to hear one of their own speak nonsense, they might not notice that it's nonsense.

So, just as in the not-too-distance past, the GOP found Marco Rubio to talk trash about immigration and Tim Scott to defend the denial of voting rights protections, they hunted and found a woman little known nationally to speak for them.

Cathy McMorris Rodgers has a voting record any Tea Partier would be proud of.  She is a strong supporter of all those rich white men, against not just the Affordable Care Act, but Medicare and Medicaid, prefers subsidies to the rich to subsidies to the poor, and opposes women's rights to medical privacy -- by which I mean abortion and contraception services.  Like her brothers-in-arms, she opposes equal rights and protections for LGBT, undocumented workers, American Indians, and, let me say it again, women.

I am looking forward to hearing what Rodgers has to say tonight, although to be honest I might not be able to get through it.  I am confident though that in Rodgers the GOP has found exactly what they are looking for:  someone to represent the men of today's republican party.