I would have posted this sooner but I ended up locked in a two-hour Twitter battle over it, the highlight of which was my being compared to a hypothetical German in the early years of the Third Reich who refused to go jumping to conclusions about Hitler. Anyway, Politico explains:

[W]hen you see Nancy Pelosi, the Republican National Committee wants you to think “Pussy Galore.”

At least that’s the takeaway from a video released by the committee this week – a video that puts Pelosi side-by-side with the aforementioned villainess from the 1964 James Bond film “Goldfinger.”

The RNC video, which begins with the speaker’s head in the iconic spy-series gun sight, implies that Pelosi has used her feminine wiles to dodge the truth about whether or not she was briefed by the CIA on the use of waterboarding in 2002. While the P-word is never mentioned directly, in one section the speaker appears in a split screen alongside the Bond nemesis – and the video’s tagline is “Democrats Galore.”

The RNC does occasionally display suicidal tendencies — see, e.g., pretty much anything to come out of Michael Steele’s mouth over the past few months — but I can’t believe they intended to call Pelosi a “pussy” knowing how offensive it is, how many votes it could cost them, and how outrageously outraged the media would be on her behalf as a way of changing the subject from her lies about waterboarding. Even the GOP’s not that self-destructive. They are, however, evidently tone-deaf enough to cast her in the role of a generic Bond femme fatale here, which very stupidly and gratuitously injects her gender into a war they were winning. The left’s cried wolf over GOP ads so many times, in such astoundingly hysterical ways, that by now the presumption of innocence is almost irrebuttable. And yet, I’d love to know who among the Republican brain trust thought this was a good idea. Even if their motives were pure, after seeing what happened to Limbaugh’s “I hope he fails” comment, they simply have to be more attuned to how their message will be received and whether they’re giving their opponents easy opportunities to distort it. A private citizen like Rush, who doesn’t have to worry about winning elections, can afford to be indifferent to that. In the case of the RNC, it’s inexcusable.