Busting the spectre of communism is hard enough without your boys ragging you for still being single. But still, alleged presidential candidate and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) must endure moments like the one today when a colleague’s quip about Graham’s luck with the “hoes” got picked up on a nearby mic.

Huffington Post reporter Sam Stein caught normally staid Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) getting on the eligible bachelor’s case during a roll-call vote in the Senate Appropriations Committee Thursday morning. About 20 seconds in, you can hear Kirk challenging his bro’s game:

“I’ve been joking with Lindsey,” Kirk can be heard saying. “Did you see that? He’s going to have a rotating first lady. He’s a bro with no ho.”

Graham’s bachelorhood has been much-discussed since the launch of his presidential campaign. The senator is single with no children, which has raised questions about whether voters might find him unrelatable. Graham has laughed it off and even joked recently that he’ll have more than one first lady once he gets to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

“I feel real comfortable with who I am and the life I’ve lived,” Graham recently told The Huffington Post. “The last time I checked, I didn’t see a sign on the White House that said ‘single people need not apply.’”

Kirk was evidently so amused with the “ho” riff that he repeated it toward the end of the clip. Asked by HuffPo about the joke line, “Kirk’s office would only say that the senator was ‘joking around with his colleagues.’”

Graham, who apparently has not yet responded to Kirk’s remarks, has insisted for years that “I ain’t gay,” repeatedly offering to bomb foreign countries or murder Al Qaeda sympathizers to prove his straight white guy bona fides.

Update: A Chicago-based commenter points out that the Tribune managed to decipher the rest of Kirk’s otherwise unintelligible whisperings:

“He’s a bro with no ho,” Kirk said, apparently talking to a colleague. “That’s what we’d say on the South Side.

Recent Census reports indicate that the South Side area of Chicago is 97.4 percent black. The Trib reminds us:

Kirk has been criticized for remarks in the past, including his call in 2013 for the mass arrest of what he called the 18,000-strong Gangster Disciples.

He later said he still supported mass arrests of gang members but that he used the 18,000 figure to shock Illinoisans into seeing how extensive the state’s gang issue is.

In an interview this year with the Peoria Journal Star, Kirk said people drive faster through black neighborhoods.

[Photo credit: AP Images]

Contact the author at adam@gawker.com.
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