RNC Chairman Reince Priebus today deflected Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-NV) calls for Mitt Romney to release more tax returns by resorting to outright name-calling.

On ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Priebus first said he would not respond to the comments and seconds later launched into a personal attack on Reid:

PRIEBUS: As far as Harry Reid is concerned, listen, I know you might want to go down that road, I’m not going to respond to a dirty liar, who hasn’t filed a single page of tax returns himself, complains about people with money, but lives in the Ritz-Carlton here down the street. So if that’s on the agenda, I’m not going to go there. This is just a made-up issue. The fact that we’re going to spend any time talking about it is just ridiculous.

STEPHANOPOULOS: You say you’re not gonna respond, but you just called him “a dirty liar.” You stand by that? You think Harry Reid is a “dirty liar?”

PRIEBUS: I just said it.

Watch the video:

Assuming Priebus meant to say that Reid has not publicly released his tax returns, it is worth noting that given the level of the office, most successful presidential nominees have released their tax returns since the 1970s. The same tradition does not apply to those in Congress and Reid has never been a presidential candidate.

Reid, citing an anonymous source, claimed this week that Romney may not have paid any taxes for 10 years.

On Friday, Romney himself dismissed Reid’s attacks, lamenting the tone of the campaign. He said “I had hoped it would be a debate about the direction of the country. What we’re seeing instead is one attack after the other — misleading, false attacks.”

In an interview on CNN’s State of the Union with Candy Crowley this morning, host Crowley asked RNC Chairman Reince Priebus about a widely-denounced proposal for a pro-Mitt Romney outside group to run millions of dollars in race-baiting attack ads highlighting controversial statement’s by President Obama’s former pastor.

Rather than denounce the proposal or the dangers of having a small group of rich outside donors and corporations free to spend as much as they want to influence elections, Priebus blamed Obama.

After lamenting that Romney and his party had to spend a day and a half dealing with the fallout from the Super PAC proposal, Priebus told Crowley:

I know how it works. It’s the Democrats and Barack Obama that want the story out there. He wants the story to play out in the media, because for every day that [Obama adviser] David Axelrod and this President don’t have to talk about their broken promises when it comes to jobs, the debt, and the deficit — the more time they can talk about hypotheticals that may or may not come true — is a day they want to win on. So, look, this president’s got a bigger problem and his problem is no matter what he puts out there, no matter what distractions he puts out there, he can’t change the truth and escape the reality of where we are in this American economy. And it’s no good.

Watch the video:

It was, of course, actually a Republican strategist with a long history of race-baiting ads who proposed these attack ads for a Super PAC led by a billionaire determined to defeat President Obama’s re-election.

And it was Mitt Romney who, back in February, made similar attacks on President Obama saying: “I don’t know what is worse, him listening to Rev. Wright or him saying that we must be a less Christian nation.” When asked this week about the comments, Romney told reporters “I’m not familiar precisely with exactly what I said, but I stand by what I said, whatever it was.” This, of course, the same Romney who repudiated the Super PAC proposal as “character assassination.”

Citing attacks on abortion and contraception rights, many liberals have accused Republicans of waging a “war on women.”

But in an interview with Bloomberg TV, Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Reince Priebus dismissed these charges as entirely baseless. He comparing the “war on women” to a “war on caterpillars,” blaming the media for trumping up the supposedly fictional attacks on women’s rights:

“If the Democrats said we had a war on caterpillars and every mainstream media outlet talked about the fact that Republicans have a war on caterpillars, then we’d have problems with caterpillars,” Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital with Al Hunt” airing this weekend. “It’s a fiction.”

While his choice of comparison to caterpillars is questionable, the bigger problem with Priebus’ comments is that they completely ignore the fact that policies advanced by his party in Congress and the states are already having an effect on women’s rights and women’s health. One could take issue with calling it a “war on women,” but not the reality that conservatives are actively working to curtail women’s constitutionally guaranteed rights as much as possible in dozens of states across the country, and access to contraception in Congress.

While some conservative environmental policies may hurt caterpillars somewhere, Republican lawmakers haven’t systematically targeted the insect’s rights the way they have with women.

To dismiss and belittle this fact with a glib remark suggests Priebus is either ignorant or in denial. Given that attitude, perhaps it’s not surprising Mitt Romney is struggling to gain support from female voters.