In a comment to another post, Umlud provided a link to this post from Thoughts from Kansas about the following joke allegedly told by John McCain in 1986 when speaking to the National League of Cities and Towns:

Did you hear the one about the woman who is attacked on the street by a gorilla, beaten senseless, raped repeatedly and left to die? When she finally regains consciousness and tries to speak, her doctor leans over to hear her sigh contently and to feebly ask, “Where is that marvelous ape?”

Here is an image of the original story about the incident in the Tucson Citizen (link to image found at Think Progress). I know it’s small and hard to read, but I wanted to provide the original source.

According to Think Progress,

McCain said he did not “recall” telling the joke. More recently, the McCain campaign scheduled a fundraiser with a Texas oilman who compared rape to the weather while running for governor. “As long as it’s inevitable, you might as well lie back and enjoy it,” said Clayton Williams in 1990. After public outcry, the event was “postponed.”

From what I recall, the comment by Williams was widely credited as a major reason Ann Richards won the gubernatorial campaign, becoming the second female governor of Texas.

Huh. I was looking up some information on Ann Richards really quick and discovered this list of the governors of Texas and discovered there have only been 6 Republican governors of Texas, and two of those were right after the Civil War, when the Republican party had quite a different platform and orientation. The other 4 have all been since 1979. And my home state of Oklahoma has only had 4. This shouldn’t be surprising, given that the Southern swing to the Republican party occurred mostly after the Civil Rights movement and Civil Rights legislation signed into law by President Lydon Johnson (who correctly predicted that the Democratic party would lose the South as a result of the policies), but it still surprised me.

Thanks for the link, Umlud!