Appearing on MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell on Wednesday night, Nina Burleigh of Newsweek crudely joked that Republicans who defended Pence and Indiana’s Religious Freedom Act were experiencing “premature intolerance ejaculation.”
The liberal commentator went on to smear the potential 2016 Republican presidential candidates by claiming that their “premature intolerance ejaculation” can be fixed with “pills for that at Walmart, and you can get them over the counter and you don't have to have a prescription, which, as you know, the RFRA law and the Hobby Lobby bringing that to the Supreme Court all had to do with women's right to get birth control pills from places like Walmart.”
The Newsweek contributor’s comments came in response to host Lawrence O’Donnell highlighting the supposed clash between business Republicans and cultural conservatives:
[t]his is that face-off that we've been seeing over the years recently between corporate Republicanism and these religious values Republicans, and it seems like, okay, the corporate side of it is now really kind of organized and working. But what took them so long? This might not be so hard now if they had been working on this earlier.
Burleigh is no stranger to making crude comments to make a political point. In 1998, the former Time contributor recounted meeting Bill Clinton on Air Force One and proclaimed that she’d “be happy to give him [oral sex] just to thank him for keeping abortion legal.” Unsurprisingly, no one on the Last Word panel objected to Burleigh’s “joke” about Republicans who support Indiana’s Religious Freedom Act and instead eagerly laughed with approval.
See relevant transcript below.
MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell
April 1, 2015
LAWRENCE O’DONNELL: Nina this is that face-off that we've been seeing over the years recently between corporate Republicanism and these religious values Republicans, and it seems like, okay, the corporate side of it is now really kind of organized and working. But what took them so long? This might not be so hard now if they had been working on this earlier.
NINA BURLEIGH: Well what I find astonishing about it is the way the presidential candidates jumped onto the Pence side immediately. Jindal, Carson, Cruz, and Bush, the front-runner. It was like a premature intolerance ejaculation and you know there are pills for that at Walmart, and you can get them over the counter and you don't have to have a prescription, which, as you know, the RFRA law and the Hobby Lobby bringing that to the Supreme Court all had to do with women's right to get birth control pills from places like Walmart.
So what's really interesting about this, besides this jumping on prematurely, which is so embarrassing for these candidates, is the whole issue of this having been about women's rights and forced pregnancy and how the way it's going to be rescued is through the gay rights issue, right? And that's a kind of a big deal. Republicans are going to have to address.
