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On their respective radio shows today Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh went on the attack against Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) because she voted for advancing the healthcare debate forward in the Senate. Instead of criticizing her position on the bill, both Beck and Limbaugh took the lowest possible road by calling a female US senator a prostitute.

Here is the audio of Beck courtesy of Media Matters:

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Beck accused the Senate Democratic leadership of bribing Landrieu to get her vote on healthcare, “We’re with a high class prostitute. That’s what we’re with…You’re not sittin’ there in a back alley and sayin’ hey what do you say, five bucks? No, no, no this comes to your Four Seasons hotel room and does it right. There’s nobody that’s going to look at her and say oh my gosh you’re with a whore…”

Here is the audio of Limbaugh, also from Media Matters:

Limbaugh said, “That may be folks, that may be, the most expensive prostitute in the history of prostitution, and she’s bragging about it. Mary Landrieu bragging about a $300 million payoff from Dingy Harry to get her vote on this healthcare scam on Saturday night.”

The “prostitution” that Beck and Limbaugh are so outraged by is actually a grant to help the state of Louisiana cover Medicaid costs for the poor. The notion that Landrieu herself is benefitting from this deal is completely false. It is convenient for Beck and Limbaugh to also forget that these kinds of deals were common place when Republicans were in the majority. The Republicans frequently used both grants and tax breaks for corporations and industries in specific states to sway votes.

The idea that Mary Landrieu is a whore is strictly sexism. How would Beck and Limbaugh react if their beloved Sarah Palin was labeled a whore and a prostitute because she decided to quit the post that the votes of Alaska elected her to in order to sell books and make money? They would be outraged by the notion that Palin is a whore, but it is fine for them to call a sitting US Senator, who got funding for the poor in her state, a whore.

If Mary Landrieu was a man, would she still have been called a whore? I doubt it. This sexist attitude is one of the reasons why the GOP is going to continue to struggle to attract a majority of female voters. There are lots of conservative women out there, but many Independent and Democratic women are pushed away by such sexist rhetoric, at a time when the Republican Party needs to attract more voters, instead of pushing them away.