MSNBC's Martin Bashir has long been keen on hammering home a message that the GOP in general and candidates like Rick Santorum in particular are anti-woman. So it should come as no surprise that the afternoon host is flabbergasted Republican women in Ohio favor Romney by a double-digit margin.
"We have some shocking numbers from a University of Cincinnati poll. Santorum carrying women voters by almost 20 points. I have to repeat that: 20 points! I mean, can you explain that?" Bashir asked guest Goldie Taylor during today's program. "Why would women rush to support Rick Santorum given what he's said in the last two months?"
Bashir failed to elaborate on what, exactly, Santorum said that should turn off women voters, but perhaps that is because the MSNBC host is worried his network's job at distorting Santorum's arguments has failed to catch on with voters in crucial swing states this November.
"Are you telling me then that in Ohio, multiple numbers of women would like to take the issue of contraception back to 1953, are taking the view that their best place is in the home, that they shouldn't find fulfillment [emphasis mine] in the workplace, as Rick Santorum chides in his book? Is that really what people think?" a worried Bashir pressed Taylor.
Of course, Bashir was grossly distorting what Santorum said in his book about women in the home and workplace, and his 1953 crack about contraception is a typical instance of an MSNBC host conflating opposition to the ObamaCare contraception mandate with the very right of an individual to purchase contraception him or herself.
Later in the March 1 program, Bashir turned the clock back even further, making a snark about Santorum having an ethic on contraception that hails from "the 13th century."
At another point on today's show, Bashir repeated another smear of Santorum furthered by MSNBC hosts like Alex Wagner, that he's anti-higher education.
Discussing how radio host Rush Limbaugh had mocked Georgetown University Law School student Sandra Fluke, Bashir told guest Krystal Ball that:
It almost feels as though this young woman is disqualified, a) because she's a student and of course we don't want, according to some Republican candidates, for our young people to go to university, she talks about birth control, well, of course no one should have the right to birth control, and of course, she's a woman.
There's a difference between being a journalist, albeit a liberally-biased one, and being a full-fledged partisan liberal hack. Bashir has crossed from the former into the latter in his career at MSNBC.
