Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski was positively giddy this morning when she introduced a video segment covering recent remarks by Mitch McConnell regarding Hillary Clinton and the upcoming election. (You can watch a video of it at the link, but since MSNBC no longer offers the clips as embeds I can’t include it and don’t feel like manually doing a transcript.) She repeatedly described the Senate Majority Leader’s comments as “a gift” to Clinton, so it immediately caught my attention. What could Mitch have done now to help out Hillary’s scandal plagued candidacy?

Well, as it turned out, McConnell was actually delivering a pleasant surprise to conservatives for once and was calling out Hillary for relying so heavily on playing the gender card, hoping to capitalize on the “historic” nature of her candidacy. Here’s the video of Mitch, which is thankfully quite short.

Real Clear Politics has the transcript.

SEN. MITCH: Hillary is going to run straight left, just like the president did, and their gamble is the country is further left than it used to be.

Let me tell you why I think that’s a flawed strategy. I don’t think arguing: “Vote for me because I’m a woman” is enough.

You may recall my election last year year. The gender card alone is not enough. I beat my opponent with women in my race because the gender card alone is not enough. I’m sure there are millions of Americans who would love to have a woman president. The question is a woman president to do what?

Scarborough was fairly quick to challenge Mika, reminding her how many times she had gushed over the idea of electing a woman, basically for no other reason than her gender. Though Brzezinski denied it repeatedly, her efforts to refute the charge seemed a bit hollow as I recalled the network repeatedly running clips of her saying pretty much that precise thing while promoting her last book tour. Still, Clinton herself seemed to be taking her cues from Mika and jumped out onto the attack. (Huffington Post)

Hillary Clinton fired back at Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Monday after he accused her of playing the “gender card” during her presidential campaign.

“Wow,” Clinton told HuffPost during a Facebook question-and-answer session. “If that’s what he said, Mitch McConnell really doesn’t get it. There is a gender card being played in this campaign. It’s played every time Republicans vote against giving women equal pay, deny families access to affordable child care or family leave, refuse to let women make decisions about their health or have access to free contraception.”

This is some fairly tired and typical “GOP War on Women” stuff being recycled from the last campaign. But it does raise some other interesting points which Clinton may wish to answer. Why has Clinton herself shown up repeatedly saying the same thing? Even before she was officially in the race she was making one stop after another asking, Don’t you want to see a female president? She’s been playing the gender card faster, harder and earlier than Barack Obama’s supporters played the race card in 2008. It’s history in the making! You don’t want to stand in the way of that, do you?

Fair enough. But do Clinton and the Democrats really want to go there this year? Conservatives haven’t been arguing against some diversity in the Oval Office. In fact, they’re rounding up one of the most mixed bag rodeos of contenders seen in history. And that comes in contrast to the Democrat candidates which are made up entirely of old white men except for Clinton herself. But hey… maybe it is time for a female president, Madam Secretary. But perhaps not you. Or maybe we could have another black guy, even if the first one didn’t work out so well. No? Well how about an Indian American who seems crackerjack smart? Maybe it’s long past time for an Hispanic president. (Oh, look… there’s another one.)

But in the end, I guess none of those are good enough, huh? Not only does it have to be a woman… it has to be you. The funny thing is that while you’re out there defending against the very real charges that you are playing the gender card, your opponents are ignoring race and gender entirely while fielding a far more diverse slate of hopefuls than your party can seem to manage. But it’s the GOP who holds down women and minorities, right?

Pull the other one, sister. It’s got bells on it.