I think a legal deadline for taking his name off the ballot passed just a day or two after he made this particular idiotic comment. In practical terms, yes, it would be hard to replace him and have a credible shot at winning.
A little more fun from Wikipedia: just last year Akin said liberals hate God. And back in 1995, Republican Rep. Henry Aldridge (Derp-NC) said basically the same thing Akin said. I think this was the comment I was thinking of earlier. I believe I first encountered it on a “Stupid Quotes of the Day” calendar.
Maaaaaybe, maybe Glenn was saying we shouldn’t resort to the politics of personal destruction over one ignorant statement, but even so, I think Beck is wrong either way.
Akin shoulda’ stayed with “I think life begins at conception”.
Overall, I think this only bothers the voters with whom abortion is a “front and center” issue. The voters who think that there’s not much effect he can have on abortion anyway (or are more concerned about the economy, for example) aren’t gonna switch their votes to the opponent over this single ignorant belief.
Right. Jeez, a guy says one moronic thing with one basic biological mistake and two or three separate offensive ideas behind it and suddenly people think he’s too stupid to be on a Congressional science committee.
Yes, but it is the smartest way to rub everybody’s faces in the fact that St. Sarah was right and the stupid primary voters were wrong. Priorities, people…!
There’s legit- er, non-hypocritical middle ground: “A fetus is worth less than a full-fledged human being, but it’s not something you can ‘kill’ at whim either. So if you want to have an abortion, you’d better have a darn good reason for doing so.”
An ambiguous word in context. Does he mean “legitimate” rape as opposed to non-forcible, statutory rape? Or as opposed to a fake-rape scenario where the sex was consensual but the woman falsely cries rape? Or as opposed to a Potiphar’s-wife scenario where there was no sex at all but the woman cries rape?
From what I’ve been reading over the past few days, it’s pretty clear that he meant to say “forcible”, as advised by the octor and organizations cited above, but he couldn’t think of the correct word, so he said “legitimate”. meaning the kind of rape they thought of as “true” rape, and he hoped that would get him through. it clearly didn’t, as the current firestorm attests. Also, it’s clear he missed out on saying the correct code word, as his ciomplaints about saying 'one wrong word, one time" makes clear. He’s obvuiously complaining about the grief he’s getting from fellow Republicans over this, because I’m sure he didn’t expect this response from the Democrats and liberals, who would oppose him anyway.
of course, to them, it’s much more than “just one word”, because it exposes a vastly different mindset and philosophy, as the above posts make clear.
The doctor Akin cited makes the excuse that we are not considering “statutory” rape, which one could certainly argue that "forcible: could be opposed to (not that all statutory rape in consensual), but I think that the larger question you are asking here is relevant – despite the plausible deniability that "forcible’ rape stands in distinction to "statutory’ rape, I suspect that there are other, unspoken categories that people have written about above – not just non-rape that is called that as in the cae of Potiphar’s wife, but any time that they think people are trying to gget an abortion – it’s not “legitimate” rape.
So we’ve gone from a discussion about Mitt’s tiny tax rate and his massive Swiss bank accounts to a discussion about how many Republicans think women are all potential sluts who will commit perjury to kill babies.
Maybe more like a tuna saying “I’ll be the sushi!”
I’m going to spoiler this to fend off the torches and pitchforks (maybe), but I’ve had it running through my head since yesterday and I gotta try to get it out:
We built this Party,
We built this Party with schlock and dough . . .
I think that’s a less extreme position. “You’ve been raped and are pregnant? I know it seems impossible, but God has a plan for you and the baby” is a lot less mean-spirited than “You claim you’ve been raped and are pregnant? Something’s off there. You must have wanted to fuck, or else your body would have shut that whole process down.” The person saying the former is at least consistent–they would say the same thing if someone got in a car accident and lost their legs. The second is the most complete expression of blaming-the-victim I think I’ve seen: it’s like saying the fact that someone’s house burned means they must have been a thief, because only stolen property burns.
There are a couple of problems here. The first is that she’s quoted as saying rape is a blessing, which is at best deeply insensitive. Taking the position in context it’s less offensive, but it’s dumb for an elected official to wade into this. So her ststupid phrasing just helps keep this argument going, which is not what the Republicans want here. And her comment really does not have much to do with what Akin said. Akin and Huckabee believe what Barnes said, but that’s not what Akin was trying to say. He was saying rape victims don’t get pregnant, not that rape victims shouldn’t have abortions.
