With both President Donald Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, making statements before the camera Monday, your average Republican would have to say something really outrageous to even register on the scandal meter … and yet Rep. Blake Farenthold managed to do it.

The Associated Press threw some chum to reporters with its headline, “Lawmaker blames female senators for failed bill,” but it was a detail from later in the article that really got the waters roiling. Not only did Farenthold blame Congress’ failure to repeal Obamacare on “some female senators from the Northeast” — he added in a radio interview that were it “a guy from south Texas” impeding the process, he “might ask him to step outside and settle this Aaron Burr-style.”

Enclosing “female senators” in quotations was a nice touch and perhaps part of the AP’s effort to embrace gender fluidity in reporting.

Who could have known that throwing the image of guns into the mix would go over so poorly?

Yeah, not really. We’re not defending Farenthold’s choice of words here, because he really ought to know by now that the greatest minds on Twitter will willfully misinterpret analogies to fit their narrative. So just ignore the part about “if they were men.”

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That’s more like it.

However, rather than run with the idea that the Congressman was advocating shooting his female colleagues, reporters and others decided to take the opposite tack, realizing that some body-shaming would work wonders in this instance.

OK, get ready for a flood of duck pajama photos from a 2009 costume party/fundraiser. It’s not pretty, but it’s not Rudy Giuliani in drag again, so that’s a plus.

Republicans already had made a complete mess of their health care messaging; maybe Farenthold could do the GOP a huge favor a stop helping.

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