"Do you wonder why people are so mixed up when the bimbos the TV stations send out don’t even know what the bill does?"

Said Mark Belling on the radio, using a word that the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Daniel Bice questions:

OK, "bimbo" is a little dated. Still, should Belling be using that term to deride female TV journalists? What's his term du jour for their incompetent male counterparts?

When I hear "bimbo," I think of "bimbo eruptions," a term coined by Governor Bill Clinton's chief of staff Betsey Ross Wright:

As deputy chair of the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign, Wright established the rapid response system that was responsible for defending Clinton's record in Arkansas and promptly answering all personal attacks on the candidate. During the 1992 campaign, Wright coined the term "bimbo eruptions" to describe rumors alleging extramarital affairs by Clinton. 

How sexual is the term "bimbo"? Can it just mean idiot or does Belling seem to be insinuating that the reporter is slutty?

By the way, "bimbo" originally referred to a male, as the "o" ending suggests. (It means "baby" in the original Italian.) The oldest English usage is for "A fellow, chap; usu. contemptuous." That goes back to 1919, with the female meaning arriving a decade later: "A woman; esp. a whore." That's from the (unlinkable) OED, which has a draft addition from 2004: "derogatory. A young woman considered to be sexually attractive but of limited intelligence. (Now the usual sense.)" The OED quotes a Woody Allen story from 1976, "The Whore of Mensa":

"I'm on the road a lot. You know how it is - lonely. Oh, not what you're thinking. See, Kaiser, I'm basically an intellectual. Sure, a guy can meet all the bimbos he wants. But the really brainy women - they're not so easy to find on short notice."

ADDED: I searched for "bimbo" in Carl Bernstein's book about Hillary "A Woman in Charge," and I found this quote from "one of her aides":

She doesn’t look at her life as a series of crises but rather a series of battles. I think of her viewing herself in more heroic terms, an epic character like in The Iliad, fighting battle after battle. Yes, she succumbs to victimization sometimes, in that when the truth becomes too painful, when she is faced with with the repercussions of her own mistakes or flaws, she falls into victimhood. But that’s a last resort and when she does allow the wallowing it’s only in the warm glow of martyrdom—as a laudable victim—a martyr in the tradition of Joan of Arc, a martyr in the religious sense. She would much rather play the woman warrior—whether it’s against the bimbos, the press, the other party, the other candidate, the right-wing. She’s happiest when she’s fighting, when she has identified the enemy and goes into attack mode…. That’s what she thrives on more than anything—the battle.

Rush Limbaugh takes on TNR's "Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker" and (in the process) says my name.

I was already listening to that section of the podcast of today's show when Meade — prompted by this rhhardin comment ("Althouse got a mention and quote on Rush at 14:15 eastern" — let me know Rush said my name today. So I just missed the weird experience of listening to a show and suddenly hearing my name. Instead I had the somewhat more unsettling experience of listening waiting for my name to come up, and I think my immediate response was something like "uh oh." Because much as I like what I write to get lifted up by one form of media or another, whenever something is grabbed and used, it's used for someone else's purposes.

So Rush was talking about how Scott Walker is a great model for what the GOP needs to do to win, which is to stand on conservative principle and ignore the advice to move to the middle. And:

Look at the new New Republic cover, smearing Scott Walker for his "toxic strain of racial politics."

I live in Wisconsin, and I've been following Scott Walker since the 2010 election here, and I have no idea what the "toxic strain of racial politics" refers to. But congratulations to TNR for its eye-catching and weird sexualization of Walker: "Scott Walker Is So Hot Right Now" and for having the nerve to sub-head with "too bad" as you smear him with the accusation of "toxic strain of racial politics." That "too bad" belongs in the annals of self-refuting statements. Anyone can within one second perceive that The New Republic isn't the slightest bit sad that there's this dirt to throw at Walker... this invented dirt for all I can tell.

If you look at the TNR website right now, you won't see this cover. It's still displaying last week's cover. I subscribe to the magazine, and this new issue just popped into my iPad.

ADDED: I can't link to the article, but I can read it on my iPad. It's titled — creepily — "The Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker." Sub-head: "A Journey Through the Poisonous World That Produced a Republican Star." It's written by Alec MacGillis.

AND: I have now read the long article, and the closest thing to anything racial coming directly from Scott Walker is his support over the years for voter ID laws. Much of the article is about the demographics of Milwaukee and the suburban counties around it, including the history — going back into the early 20th century — of how black people migrated to the city and did not — as white people did — relocate into the suburbs.

Milwaukee is an extreme example of this historical pattern, but Scott Walker didn't make this happen, and given that Scott Walker built his political career in the Milwaukee area, it's actually impressive that TNR could not find racial incidents and slips to pin on him.

The article also focuses on 2 talk radio hosts — Mark Belling and Charlie Sykes — who have big audiences in Milwaukee. TNR has little direct racial material on them, but it forefronts the one truly ugly thing it has: Belling mocking a specific black person, Milwaukee Congresswoman Gwen Moore. Mostly, TNR accuses Belling and Sykes of indulging in dog-whistle politics about crime and dependence on welfare.

I suspect that Alec MacGillis wrote a more balanced and sane draft but that TNR editors punched it up, trying to make it racial so they could justify that ridiculous sub-heading on the cover and the title and sub-head at the article. The Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker! Terrible. MacGillis provides some material about Scott Walker's early life, mostly about how he's the son of a Baptist preacher who took religion and politics very seriously from an early age. Some of that is sympathetic, though it's dotted with quotes from individuals who have reason to want to block Walker's ascent.

ALSO: Linking here, Instapundit says:

When Chris Hughes relaunched TNR, he promised that TNR would go “deeper than the headlines in a timely, unbiased fashion.” Nah. Just more Democratic operatives with bylines.

AND: I wonder if TNR meant to send out the iPad app version before the material is up on its website. I think it's damned strange that I was able to show you that cover 2 hours ago, and it's still not up on the website, and that I could read the whole long article and give you my subjective understanding of what is in it before you can check the text. Do you think it's lack of website/app coordination at TNR, which would be inept, or do you think they want subscribers to get a special advantage, a sneak peak, which would be naive in a world with bloggers?

UPDATE: It's 6 hours since I posted this, and neither the cover nor the article are up at the TNR website. 

UPDATE 2: TNR put the article up Sunday evening: here.