Rape and Repuglycans

Todd Akin, the Republican candidate for a Senate seat in Missouri, said last week that legitimate rape rarely causes pregnancy and that "If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down."

This is what happens when you run a party to appeal to the basest instincts of human nature, to ignorance, and to prejudice: the candidates that make it through the primary process end up representing the bases instincts, the ignorance and the prejudice of the majority of that party's voters.

If your platform seeks to draw such lines as the "fact" that humans have no significant impact on the climate change process, that women who get raped should be punished by being forced to save the "innocent baby", that anyone who seeks to put some limits on the availability of mass-killing weapons is in cahoots with the United Nations to strip all Americans of their Second Amendment rights, or that seeking to protect Medicare from being voucherized is communism, then you get people like Todd Akin elected; and when you do, you have to live with the consequences of their ignorance, prejudice, and vile lack of intelligence, and their clumsy attempts at retracting their "mis-statements".

As Kaili Joy Gray at the Daily Kos, and many others, have correctly pointed out, the fact is not that Todd Akin is out of step with the Republican Party: He is in perfect alignment with the majority of primary voters and with the people who funded his campaign, including the majority of the Republican establishment and its talking heads.

It's like former Reagan adviser Bruce Bartlett recently said in an interview on The Daily Show: one of our parties is insane, and we know which one it is.