August 14, 2015 01:14 PM UTC

Attention Team Coffman: Never Call a Woman "Shrill"

• 19 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

UPDATE #2: Count the Colorado Senate Majority Office in, it’s a male chauvinist dogpile:

#Copolitics Thought Police today issued new guidance on use of the word “shrill.” Repubs and men can qualify as “shrill,” but never women

— Colorado Senate GOP (@ColoSenGOP) August 14, 2015

Yes, that’s pretty much right, gentlemen! Seriously though, is Bill Cadman approving these?

I wonder if Nancy Spence was still in your caucus if you could’ve got away with this. #copolitics #coleg https://t.co/pLzln1yXme

— MissingPundit (@MissingPundit) August 14, 2015

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UPDATE: EMILY’s List throws down:

It’s no surprise that Coffman surrounds himself with someone who would launch personal attacks against an accomplished state senator. Representative Coffman himself has a long history of supporting dangerous policies that hurt women and families, such as cosponsoring legislation that would weaken protections that ensure women don’t have to choose between having a child and having a job, twice voting against ending gender discrimination in pay, proudly opposing abortion even in cases of rape and incest, and even wanting to ban some forms of birth control.

It’s clear that Mike Coffman doesn’t understand women, doesn’t care to help women tackle the challenges they face in their daily lives, and certainly doesn’t respect women.

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The Colorado Statesman’s Vic Vela follows up this week’s exchange of rhetorical fire between Democratic CD-6 candidate Morgan Carroll and Rep. Mike Coffman over Coffman’s oversight role in the boondoggle-d (but still needed) VA medical center in Aurora. As we expected, Carroll’s lack of due reverence for Coffman’s supposedly untouchable record on military matters has his campaign surrogates more or less apoplectic.

Which may prove an easy way to get them in trouble.

In an interview with The Colorado Statesman Wednesday, Carroll, a Democrat, blasted the effectiveness of the Republican Coffman’s role in overseeing the workings of the Department of Veterans’ Affairs.

Coffman sits on the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs and is the chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.

“He was set up to be in a prime position to help shepherd and deliver the VA hospital to this district,” Carroll said. “It’s his district. He’s on the committee. He’s chairing the oversight committee. And what happened?

“It’s the poster child for a failed project. It’s failed leadership and failed oversight.”

Longtime paid Coffman campaign consultant Josh Penry fires back indignantly from the hip:

“Morgan Carroll is living up to her reputation and record as Morgan Carroll the legislator,” Penry said. “She is very partisan, very shrill and very liberal. [Pols emphasis]

“It’s incredibly disingenuous. No one is buying it; no one is believing it. My guess is she’s having a hard time keeping a straight face.”

Now first of all, as our readers know, Democrats and third-party groups have been chipping away at Coffman’s grandstanding on the Aurora VA hospital project for quite some time. No one is suggesting that the chairman of the VA Committee’s Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee is alone in responsibility, but he certainly shares responsibility for the failure to get the project completed–a liability that becomes more precarious for Coffman every time Republican leadership in Congress refuses to provide certainty. Yes, the new Aurora VA hospital is way over budget. But if you compare the overruns on this project to any number of vastly more expensive defense projects that have cost taxpayers billions (plural) more than expected, projects we could spend all afternoon making an incomplete list of?

You can see why Team Coffman is so prickly. Despite all the presumption on the issue Coffman has managed to cultivate in the local media, this could all very easily be turned against him by next summer–and his surrogates know it.

Having established all of this once again for the record, which we expect we’ll need to do many more times in the next fifteen months, we can turn to the matter of Josh Penry referring to Senate Minority Leader Morgan Carroll as “shrill.” Now, maybe Penry is purposefully trying to appropriate a little Donald Trump mojo here, but we’re pretty sure Penry knows it’s disrespectful in a gender-specific way to refer to a woman as “shrill.” Penry and fellow conservative haters on all things politically correct might not like it, but although you can get away with calling another man “shrill,” it has a considerably more offensive connotation when applied to a woman. And for that reason, it’s really much better to find another adjective when addressing one.

Either Penry wanted to stir the gender pot to rally the “men’s rights” Trump-loving demographic to Coffman’s standard, or he’s just this caddish in real life? We wouldn’t put either by him, but we really can’t rule the former out.

We don’t see how that ends well, of course, but it’s silly season.