Charlie Crist's flippant suggestion that Marco Rubio got his back waxed on Republican donors' money was certainly an ill-advised attempt at humor, but the conservative conspiracy theorists and fervent Rubio supporters at RedState.com wonder if the remark was somehow gay baiting or racist.
Writes Erick Erickson:
I don't know if he was trying to make a racial statement, which would be in keeping with what his campaign has done all along in trying to make Marco Rubio as Hispanic as possible, or if he was gay baiting. I do know straight men know very little, if anything, about back waxing, which makes me wonder why that would come off the top of Charlie Crist's head.Wait. What?
We're not exactly experts on the body-hair distribution of different ethnicities, but we have been to the beach, locker rooms, and various clubs where shirts tends to come off, and we haven't noticed that many hairy Cuban backs.
As for gay baiting -- well, yes, Crist did take a dig at Rubio's masculinity, but if we wanted to go down that road, isn't there also a bit of subliminal gay baiting to Rubio's favorite tactic of displaying the image of Crist and President Obama man-hugging it out?
And dear everyone involved: Can we stop pretending that only gay men get their backs waxed? We all know there are plenty of straight men who indulge in various body-hair management techniques. You Republicans certainly like your pro-wrasslin', and those guys probably go through more body wax a year than the patrons of a gay club on a random Saturday night.
Anyway, because this is what happens when politics cease to become about what's best for the peole and become something more of an all-out game, Erickson is suggesting his readers send back wax to Crist's office.
