After the This Week interview with Russian president Vladimir Putin, professional pundit Mary Matalin was asked for her take.
So she assembled an incongruous string of one-liners that ended with a joke about Putin shirtless being ogled by her gay friends.
1) "Can I just say? I'm so sick of sports and politics."
2) "I'm not gay and I know I'm going to get in trouble for this, but all of my gay friends think he looks so buff in his shirtless publicity photos."
3) "Why is he even talking about this?"
After just airing one of the media's most sought-after interviews, moderator George Stephanopoulos wasn't having it. "He has to talk about it," he said. "It's a huge controversy."
It's true that Putin has a perplexing reputation for taking off his shirt. For example, BuzzFeed once assembled "The 16 Most Homoerotic Photos of Vladimir Putin" and the Daily Show isn't shy about why it depicts him shirtless and horseback. Still, Matalin's partner in life and commentary, James Carville, quickly claimed the spotlight and stopped her from whatever random thought might have come next.
Parts of the Internet wondered what in the world Matalin was getting at, with headlines like: "Mary Matalin Doesn’t Get Putin’s Anti-LGBT Controversy," "Mary Matalin shrugs off Russian anti-LGBT laws," and, "Why What Mary Matalin Said Is Not Only Offensive, But A Double Standard."
For those who are wondering, Matalin is lately supportive publicly of marriage equality, having worked as a longtime aide to Dick Cheney — who supports marriage equality — and both publishing Mary Cheney's memoir and congratulating her in 2012 on getting married.
Watch video of the awkward moment below:
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