"Do you wonder why people are so mixed up when the bimbos the TV stations send out don�t even know what the bill does?"

Said Mark Belling on the radio, using a word that the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Daniel Bice questions:

OK, "bimbo" is a little dated. Still, should Belling be using that term to deride female TV journalists? What's his term du jour for their incompetent male counterparts?

When I hear "bimbo," I think of "bimbo eruptions," a term coined by Governor Bill Clinton's chief of staff Betsey Ross Wright:

As deputy chair of the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign, Wright established the rapid response system that was responsible for defending Clinton's record in Arkansas and promptly answering all personal attacks on the candidate. During the 1992 campaign, Wright coined the term "bimbo eruptions" to describe rumors alleging extramarital affairs by Clinton. 

How sexual is the term "bimbo"? Can it just mean idiot or does Belling seem to be insinuating that the reporter is slutty?

By the way, "bimbo" originally referred to a male, as the "o" ending suggests. (It means "baby" in the original Italian.) The oldest English usage is for "A fellow, chap; usu. contemptuous." That goes back to 1919, with the female meaning arriving a decade later: "A woman; esp. a whore." That's from the (unlinkable) OED, which has a draft addition from 2004: "derogatory. A young woman considered to be sexually attractive but of limited intelligence. (Now the usual sense.)" The OED quotes a Woody Allen story from 1976, "The Whore of Mensa":

"I'm on the road a lot. You know how it is - lonely. Oh, not what you're thinking. See, Kaiser, I'm basically an intellectual. Sure, a guy can meet all the bimbos he wants. But the really brainy women - they're not so easy to find on short notice."

ADDED: I searched for "bimbo" in Carl Bernstein's book about Hillary "A Woman in Charge," and I found this quote from "one of her aides":

She doesn�t look at her life as a series of crises but rather a series of battles. I think of her viewing herself in more heroic terms, an epic character like in The Iliad, fighting battle after battle. Yes, she succumbs to victimization sometimes, in that when the truth becomes too painful, when she is faced with the truth becomes too painful, when she is faced with the repercussions of her own mistakes or flaws, she falls into victimhood. But that�s a last resort and when she does allow the wallowing it�s only in the warm glow of martyrdom�as a laudable victim�a martyr in the tradition of Joan of Arc, a martyr in the religious sense. She would much rather play the woman warrior�whether it�s against the bimbos, the press, the other party, the other candidate, the right-wing. She�s happiest when she�s fighting, when she has identified the enemy and goes into attack mode�. That�s what she thrives on more than anything�the battle.