Michele Bachmann staffer Ed Rollins has been on a roll dissing Sarah Palin. Yesterday he claimed Palin wasn’t “serious,” and now he is saying Bachmann’s “just as attractive” as Palin, only smarter. Way to keep up the warring women stereotype!

Because strong women can’t share a stage without being pitted against one another, Republican strategist Ed Rollins has been hard at work playing his boss, potential presidential candidate Michele Bachmann, against possible rival Sarah Palin.

“Sarah has not been serious over the last couple of years. She got the Vice Presidential thing handed to her, she didn’t go to work in the sense of trying to gain more substance, she gave up her governorship,” Rollins said on a conservative radio show yesterday. Rollins could have walked away from the remark, but instead he’s fanning the flames.

“[Bachmann will] be so much more substantive,” Rollins told Politico. “People are going to say, ‘I gotta make a choice and go with the intelligent woman who’s every bit as attractive.’”

Sure, Rollins could, in theory, be using “attractive” as generic praise, but it seems far more likely he’s trying to project sexual objectification onto Bachmann, thereby turning her alleged battle against Palin into a beauty contest, instead of a political debate.

Palin has kept mum on the official and journalistic rumblings of a feud with Bachmann, but the former Alaska governor’s online supporters are calling on Bachmann to “refudiate” Rollins: “Either affirm her support for the long-time beltway fossil’s idiotic comments…or refudiate them.”

The way Rollins is going, Palin’s supporters may have a point.

Update: Palin adviser Michael Glassner has now involved himself in the back-and-forth, saying, “To no one’s surprise [Rollins] has done it again, while also fueling a contrived narrative about the presidential race by the mainstream media… One would expect that his woodshed moment is coming and that a retraction will be issued soon.”