Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest: Linda McMahon invents a new kind of rape: 'emergency rape'

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' CT-Sen: Linda McMahon didn't just shoot herself in the foot on Monday. She set an AK-47 on full auto and emptied the whole clip into her Pradas. It all starts here, at an interview with the Hartford Courant's editorial board:

Courant: So a rape victim, in a hospital. And it's a hospital that is run by a Catholic institution. Emergency contraception, should that be'should she be sent to another hospital in the middle of the night when she's in dire distress?

McMahon: I don't think that the government should overreach. I mean it's a separation of church and state in my view, and I think that a religious institution has the right to decide what its policies would be in that, in that case.

Courant: Yeah and I respect that, I just wonder if that institution, gets a certain, a majority of it's money from the government, if it's mostly federally funded, does that play a role in your thinking?

McMahon: Well I just think again, that it is an issue of separation of church and state, and that institution should decide what its role would be, and what it's comfortable with doing in that instance.

In other words, exactly the kind of thing McMahon should have the brains not to say in an overwhelmingly pro-choice state like Connecticut. Of course, the damage was instant. But then... wow did she ever dig her hole even deeper in attempting to un-screw herself at Monday night's debate with Chris Murphy:

I do want to clarify one thing that Congressman Murphy had said about this, um, the rape issue and contraception. That was asking the Hartford Courant review board, and it was really an issue about a Catholic church being forced to offer those pills if the person came in in an emergency rape... that was my response to it. I absolutely think that we should avail women who come in with rape victims the opportunity to have those morning after pills or that treatment that they should get."

Whoda thunk that Linda McMahon would join the Todd Akin brigades? I'll have to refer to my Daily Kos colleague Kaili Joy Gray for the exact count (she's an expert at this kind of thing), but the number of different flavors of rape according to Republicans has really reached epic proportions: forcible rape, honest rape, legitimate rape (of course), easy rape, and now emergency rape. For a candidate who has insisted so hard that she's actually pro-choice, this is an extraordinary disaster. As local columnist David Collins opined:

I think Linda McMahon might have done better at Monday night's Senate debate with Chris Murphy if she had simply taken out a cigarette lighter and set hundred-dollar bills on fire.

Indeed.