In Conclusion, We Must Remember to Respect the Superior Morality of the Anti-Choice Movement
Claire McCaskill’s opponent, ladies and gentlemen:
“First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare,” Akin told KTVI-TV in an interview posted Sunday. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”
I assume this is unnecessary for our readership, but in fact “[r]ape-related pregnancy occurs with significant frequency. It is a cause of many unwanted pregnancies and is closely linked with family and domestic violence.”
…Useful context here. And this is right:
Michael Kinsley famously defined a gaffe as “when a politician tells the truth — some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say.” This election season, Republican politicians have offered a variation on this principle: They’re getting in trouble for saying some obvious truth about what they actually believe about women, baring the ignorance, contemptvand cruelty therein instead of pretending this is about protecting women or babies.
Meanwhile, Dana Loesch has said the dumbest thing that will ever be said until the next time a Brietbart crony says something, which I’m sure won’t stop those CNN checks from rolling in.
In his defense he doesn’t understand very much.
In his defense he doesn’t understand
very muchanything.FTFY
FTF both of Y.
There is no defense. If as an adult, elected politician, you don’t know that personal/legal definitions of events do not, in fact, influence cell function you are a complete waste of space.
It’s never been clear to me whether the chicken comes before the egg with these people: do they believe this stuff because they’re dumbass ignorant, or do they wilfully remain dumbass ignorant because the facts would disrupt their belief system?
It’s a self-reinforcing downward spiral.
“It’s a self-reinforcing downward spiral.”
Agreed completely. I’ve got a lot of true believer right wing friends and family, and (with a few exceptions) they’ve gotten noticeably crankier of late. And I don’t mean just since Obama stole the 2008 election with ACORN and the ghost of Richard Daley, I mean in the last ten years or so.
I guess the vogue term for this is epistemic closure, but whatever you want to call it, willful ignorance does seem to reinforce itself these days. I don’t know if that’s all Rush, FOX and their various imitators, but it is very easy for a lot of people to get through their day without getting any information from a non-wingnut:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYD3wocKqJ8&t=2m58s
The kid with the “Say No To Socilism” t-shirt probably hates the “liberal media” without ever having actually read, say, the New York Times.
Just as true when the attitude was the ‘nattering nabobs of negativism’.
Close minded ignorance is nothing new and never goes out of fashion.
Fred Clark of Slacktivist argues that making yourself believe lies inevitably makes you stupider, and that makes sense to me.
Voltaire got there a while back:
I believe that Newt Gingrich’s 1994 GOPAC memo “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control” was the tipping point.
Why do people always get the wrong lesson from 1984?
Alternative: they don’t actually believe this stuff, but rather they are so contemptuous of their voter base’s intellect that they’d rather feign ignorance than admit that they just hate women and want their lives to be more difficult because the misogynist vote is important to them, is, in fact, the only vote they can expect to win.
Um, WHAT?
I believe what Akin is implying is that, if a woman does get pregnant from rape, that means she really consented. In other words, rape/incest exemptions to anti-abortion laws are not justified.
Sort of a modern day witch dunking.
“Legitimate rape” should be like “honorable Nazi” or “justified bigot”, in that it disqualifies the speaker from being taken seriously in public discourse.
That is exactly what he is saying. If you are pregnant it was not real rape.
When I was young men like this argued that if you were still alive when it was over it wasn’t real rape.
Obviously he misspoke. Rather than ‘legitimate’ he meant ‘genuine’ rape — as opposed to all those faux-rape accusations where the woman consented but changed her mind after the event and decided to blame the man, only for her duplicity to be revealed by the fact that she became pregnant. It happens all the time. Women are like that.
Given that he is also the guy who didn’t believe marital rape should be criminalized because wives will use it as a weapon and also, bitches be crazy, this does appear to be a completely accurate representation of his views.
But he and Paul Ryan have a legitimate history together writing the phrase “forcible rape” into abortion restrictions. Rather telling about their attitudes towards the ladies.
Maybe this should be a new legal defense too. Someone should ask Akin about that.
What the unholy fuck?!?! That is a level of brain dead stupid that should disqualify you from ever appearing in public, let alone run for public office.
See, this is the sort of thing that you don’t learn in sex ed.
Explain again how sheeps bladders may be employed to prevent earthquakes.
And when I say “doctors” I mean “a batshit insane state representative from Pennsylvania.” Of whom Gov. Milton Shapp once said, “What a Jesus we have in Freind.”
win
Damn you for beating me to Stephen Friend.
He was one of the very first Republicans I was able to vote against, and he remains one of the dumbest representatives I ever had.
And given the median IQ for state representatives, that’s saying something.
The depressing thing is that, from what I remember, Friend remained depressingly popular even after saying that.
Forget it, Mal. It’s Delaware County.
Home of the second-worst Springfield in Pennsylvania.
Hey!
…
Where on earth is the first worse?
(I was going to defend Springfield but then I wasn’t sure which way to defend it! Shoot out at the Springfield Mall?)
Asked what doctors Akin was referring to, a campaign spokesperson directed reporters to Dr. Mabuse, Dr. Caligari, and Senator Rand Paul (R-KY).
We could effect great savings in the field of law enforcement by applying this principle more broadly. For example, that guy that got shot to death? Totally suicide. If he’d wanted to live, he would have. Incredible savings in Health Care are also now available.
I suppose with the NeoCons having taken over the foreign-policy leadership of the Republican party it was only a matter of time until the Green Lantern Theory was applied in domestic policy as well.
This policy is already in effect. Witness the swarm of commenters who gather every time there’s a police shooting or tasing to say “dude shouldn’t have disrespected the cop.”
Also, the entire magical-thinking positive-thought, name-it-claim-it new-age prosperity gospel Christian Science giant steaming heap of bullshit, which blames people for their failures because they didn’t have a good enough attitude or pray hard enough or what the fuck ever, so the universe / God didn’t provide it.
I’ve always been fascinated by these creeps. Apparently some of them can even grow up to work for major-party presidential campaigns.
Rmoney himself represented himself as a police officer in his younger days, did he not?
This is also how these feckin’ idjits look at representative democracy – they want to try “to shut that whole thing down.”
WAIT!
It gets better:
‘Akin said that even in the worst-case scenario — when the supposed natural protections against unwanted pregnancy fail — abortion should still not be a legal option for the rape victim.
“Let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work, or something,” Akin said. “I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child.”’
So, only if the woman becomes pregnant, because “maybe that didn’t work, or something,” do we then look to punish the rapist?
Up until then, he’s scott-free?
This is what happens when people can’t afford to keep their brain damaged/defective relatives locked-up in attics or basements anymore – the run for Congree.
And what is this thing about being against terminating a pregnancy after rape or incest.
I know you guys might want to keep all of your dating options open, but wouldn’t you want to, I don’t know, get rid of the evidence, “or something?”
He’s already done his worst damage to the threat of continuity in Western Civilization by passing on his genes.
This is really offensive hocus-pocus. Actually if it’s a legitimate rape situation, the female body does roughly the opposite of “shutting the whole thing down”. This is a well known reason why women often feel ashamed after being raped: the vagina will secrete the usual fluids to prevent tearing and damage just like (or even more so than) in a consensual pleasurable sex encounter. And once the sperm get in it’s not like the uterus can tell whether or not they’re welcome or not, especially since they don’t arrive until several hours later.
A woman can wilfully take the morning after pill. That’s the best way to shut down the whole thing. I’m pretty sure that isn’t what Akins meant, but someone should ask him to watch him squirm.
I don’t think that the assumption that Akin would squirm is valid. Likely Akin would see the morning-after pill as confirmation of the woman’s sluttiness.
And, IT’S AN ABORTIFACIENT! AbortionAbortionAbortion! BabyMurder!
/wingtard
I believe his position is that the morning-after pill should be banned. Along with the school lunch program and the federal student loan program because they’re not something the government should be getting involved with. But oil and gas subsidies? Perfectly okay!
I think Wonderella put it best when she said “a U.S. House Representative thinks there is like an Airplane Mode for baby parts”.
Reminds me of the schoolyard tale I heard in seventh or eighth grade: “You can’t get pregnant the first time you ‘do it.’” I’ll just assume this data came from the same study that Akin got his facts from.
Someone needs to ask him the following question: If a person is on trial for rape, should they be able to introduce, in their defense, the fact that the alleged victim was impregnated as a result? Presumably, Akin believes that pregnancy is prima facie evidence against a conclusion of rape? Does he think pregnancy is a legitimate defense for an alleged rapist?
You’re assuming that Akin believes that women should be allowed to appear in open court or press charges against men. I see little basis for this assumption.
Or, ask him what he would think and do if his wife or daughter got raped and ended up pregnant.
Well, if the ended up pregnant, they must have wanted/enjoyed it.
Unless of course it was by a blah man. In that case, he’d quietly lose the fetus.
I propose a new form of natural birth control. We’ll call it the Akin Method. I’d describe it in detail but this is a family blog, after all.
If Akin wins, then we will all be Abe Simpson.
Wait, I think I have it. If the Lesser Sex didn’t want the babiez, god would have preemptively shot a lightning bolt, or talked from some shrubbery, or something to make the man be manly somewhere else, where his services were required. Or make him dead, because that’s cool, and the way Jesus likes dealing with folks who shouldn’t get away with rape.
Some of the younger commentariwingtards are squawking now.
http://thinkprogress.org/election/2012/08/19/712151/growing-number-of-conservative-call-on-akin-to-withdraw-after-legitimate-rape-comments/
But I don’t understand their complaints, unless they’re only unhappy that Akin is politically incompetent. These are all conservatives who have happily backed hardcore culture warriors in the past (with varying degrees of emphasis, I guess, but still).
For example, Ramesh Ponnoru is a Hard-Right William Donohue Catholic. Surely he’s opposed to abortion in almost all cases, just like Akin?
Yeah, but conservative elites, in their Manhattan and Washington townhouses, are a different breed from the yokels with their revival-tent biology. They know the uterus doesn’t “shut down” after a rape, and they’re embarrassed when someone claims it does. They know raped women can have babies; they just don’t give a shit.
That’s an amusing distinction: “This yokel’s stupidity on this topic is making it harder for us to exercise our arrogant indifference on this topic.”
+1
+2
I think this must be standard cant. I remember a state legislator in NC back int he 90s making a similarly point about the juices not flowing. Ah yes, Henry Aldridge:
I sorta love the way that they use wacko phrases like “juices don’t flow” and “secrete a certain secretion”. They aren’t even trying!
Oh, I see Friend was first. Clearly there’s some juice flowing going on here.
Clearly, but it’ll take a stronger stomach than mine to follow the stream.
Franke-Ruta traces streams so we don’t have to.
Akin now says he “misspoke.” In my vocabulary, “misspoke” is something like when the teacher meant to say “Jane Austen,” but ended up saying “Jane Eyre,” or when the reporter meant to say “the Senate version” but ended up saying “the House version.”
So when Akin said “you can’t get pregnant from legitimate rape,” what did he mean to say? “You can’t get pregnant from Leviticus 8″?
“Misspoke” in this case means “I meant to tell you a lie but I forgot and told you what I really believed instead.”
No, NonyNony, that is a ‘gaffe’. This is more a case of “I said what I intended to say, accurately describing my policy, but somehow it has offended more people than it pleased, so I am asking everyone to pretend that I never said it.”
That’s such a terribly cynical interpretation, I think Akin should be given the opportunity to rebut it at every campaign stop. Let him him explain, again and again, that “I meant to say ‘women who have been raped have my deepest sympathy,’ but it came out as ‘women who have been raped can’t get pregnant’; it’s the kind of understandable slip of the tongue which could happen to anybody.”
(Compare, “It’s spelled ‘Arthur Luxury-Yacht,’ but it’s pronounced ‘Throat-Warbler Mangrove”.”)
Let us fix that. Tell us that you mis-spoke. What you really meant to say was this, wasn’t it?
It is just the same in chess, where if you make a move and realise too late that your opponent has placed you in check, you are allowed to take the move back by explaining that you just “mis-placed” that pawn.
Isn’t that how everyone plays it?
We can logically deduce this from Akin’s position:
He supports the abortion rights of women who are illegitimately raped, since they can indeed get pregnant.
Also, he has never said that men who get raped, be it legitimately of illegitimately, should be denied the right abort. That makes him pro-choice for about 3/4 of humanity in the event of rape. Clearly he is a moderate who leans left.
Why can’t you people look on the bright side for once.
I’d like to see the Nominate-DW data on his voting positions please. I bet he’s left-leaning.
No, we can logically deduce from his position that he thinks the slut had it coming and therefore wants the baby.
We learned something from this, however.
In Atkin’s own mind, sperm are smarter than he is, because they know when to stay away from a rape victim.
Apparently, the next Senator from Missouri is unaware that genetic testing suggests that the single male with the most offspring evah is Chingis Khan and he didn’t actually have time for all the wooing and dinner dates the Senator-to-be imagines he did.
Akin thinks the last line meant that he was hugger.
I remember how concerned Dana Loesch was about women maybe getting raped at Occupy camps. So concerned that she wanted the police to shut all those camps down!
I guess her concern for rape victims ends when it stops being politically convenient.