Speaking of dipshits who don't know when their fifteen minutes is up, remember Todd Akin? He's the knuckle-dragger in one of those flyover states who botched a fair chance at unseating Claire McCaskill, until he tried to play amateur gynecologist on teevee, and the wimmins were not amused.
After an apology that fooled nobody, Akin scuttled back into the woodwork, presumably distributing aspirins for sluts to keep between their knees. While nature may abhor a moron, America clearly loves them, and so of course Akin is back, with a book no less, one in which he retracts his bullshit apology, no doubt much to the relief of his true believers.
Here's Akin's assessment of how ladyparts can magically shut down their capacity to conceive:
What this really is all about, as Akin himself has made clear, is his obsession with abortion.
But if you need just one more reason to convince you let it be his impassioned -- and completely incorrect -- defense of George "Felix Macacawitz, Junior" Allen:
Perhaps just as revealing as Akin's stubborn guff is the comments in the linked article. As it predictably devolves into what Akin supposedly means, when it is perfectly clear to anyone who can actually read, the real point gets lost in the shuffle. The real point is that Akin's implications are multiple, and all of them are indefensible.
Akin's use of the phrase "legitimate rape", coupled with other comments of his, insinuate pretty clearly that he believes, though he provides no evidence or proof, either that rape must be violent to be "legitimate", or that some number of reported rapes are exaggerated by the victims. In fact, he appears to believe both of those things to some extent, though again he indicates no evidentiary knowledge of either one.
The assertion of the female body having mechanisms to shut down pregnancy as a biological response to violent rape, is perhaps one of the dumbest things ever to be uttered by a supposedly sentient human being. It betrays a complete lack of knowledge of history, particularly the history of warfare, where rape has been routinely used as a tool of war and conquest. One of the primary reasons we got involved in the Balkans in the late '90s, in addition to the Srebrenica massacre, was the widespread allegations of mass rape by military personnel. Again, rape has historically been the norm for conquering troops, as the easiest and quickest way to change the demographics of a conquered region.
More specifically, the statistical incidence of pregnancies resulting from rape is significant, and would seem to belie Akin's assertion of biological shutdown mechanisms. One would think that if it were that simple, there would be fewer than 32,000+ pregnancies per year resulting from rape. Maybe the mechanisms are broken; whatever the case, if they are not 100% infallible, one must ask if women -- adult women with their own identity and agency and rights, mind you -- can be trusted with the responsibility over their own reproductive health.
I don't have much patience with "civil" commenters such as "Hank" in the Politico comments, disingenuous tools who lament the callous incivility of intellectually dishonest liberals in practically the same breath as they launch some tired shot at Bill Clinton. Fine, Clinton was a cad and a dick, and his treatment of women has been execrable. That has no effect on the fact that Todd Akin is either a vicious liar, or an impossibly stupid person who has no business anywhere near a position of responsibility.
But the real issue here, as always, is control over the sex lives of women. Let's put it out there right now -- if any of this touched on the sex lives of men, there would be no debate, real or contrived. That shit is settled. Nobody tells us where or when to put our cocks. But somehow this bullshit persists over what women can or can't do with their junk. I think the main difference is that there are actually other women who assist in these stupid battles, where you would never find a man who would participate in repressing -- or even affecting, even a little bit -- our right to do what the fuck we want.
It takes a dickhead like Todd Akin to crystallize these nonsensical attempts to control the reproductive activities of women, but it is only with the active or passive acquiescence of other women that any of this stuff gains any traction. We can't do it without you, ladies.
After an apology that fooled nobody, Akin scuttled back into the woodwork, presumably distributing aspirins for sluts to keep between their knees. While nature may abhor a moron, America clearly loves them, and so of course Akin is back, with a book no less, one in which he retracts his bullshit apology, no doubt much to the relief of his true believers.
Here's Akin's assessment of how ladyparts can magically shut down their capacity to conceive:
“My comment about a woman’s body shutting the pregnancy down was directed to the impact of stress on fertilization. This is something fertility doctors debate and discuss. Doubt me? Google ‘stress and infertility,’ and you will find a library of research on the subject.”We all make jokes about morons such as Akin pretending to be ob-gyns, but the serious fact about conservatives in general, and Akin in particular, is that this is their stock in trade, taking fairly obvious scientific distinctions -- in this case, fertility studies correlating "stress and infertility" in the context of infertile couples trying various methods in order to conceive -- and implanting (see what I did there?) them with their own biases. Conflating such studies with scientifically and statistically unverifiable -- that is to say, a steaming load of shit Akin pulled straight out of his own ass -- conjecture about rape victims biologically self-aborting, speaks volumes about the inability of these people to understand the difference between empirical data and tarted-up religious dogma.
What this really is all about, as Akin himself has made clear, is his obsession with abortion.
Akin later says during his time as a state legislator, he wished he could have done more to “end this evil,” referring to abortion, which in his view “easily trumps slavery as the greatest moral evil in American history.”There's kind of an art to this sort of thing, if you think about it, to not only be completely hyperbolic over something that has actually been decreasing over the last twenty years, but to brazenly assert that it is a much bigger transgression than the centuries of rape, oppression, torture, murder, abuse, the sundering of families, the fucking buying and selling of human beings, forcing them to work until they drop, and keeping the profits, this should remove all doubt and permanently affix Todd Akin as an idiot and a scumbag.
But if you need just one more reason to convince you let it be his impassioned -- and completely incorrect -- defense of George "Felix Macacawitz, Junior" Allen:
In part, Akin uses the current political atmosphere and media to argue that trackers who follow candidates on the campaign trail are just looking for a candidate to slip up.Well, for one, Allen's opponent was Jim Webb, not the Indian cameraman whom Allen called "macaca". Second, while Allen may not be Portuguese, neither in particular is that word. It's a generic term used by European colonials in Africa to denigrate their native subjects. And hey, ho, whaddya know -- Allen's mother was a French national born and raised in Tunisia! This was all duly researched, verified, and chronicled back in 2006, does Todd Akin not have access to the Google, or does he only use it to feverishly squint at "stress and infertility" findings?
In that context, Akin defends former Virginia Gov. George Allen’s comments in 2006, when he called a tracker of Indian descent “macaca.” Allen would go on to lose to Democrat Jim Webb. The incident is even credited with dashing Allen’s national political ambitions.
“He could not possibly have known that, in the Portuguese language at least, the word means ‘monkey.’ Allen is not Portuguese … and neither was his opponent,” Akin writes.
Perhaps just as revealing as Akin's stubborn guff is the comments in the linked article. As it predictably devolves into what Akin supposedly means, when it is perfectly clear to anyone who can actually read, the real point gets lost in the shuffle. The real point is that Akin's implications are multiple, and all of them are indefensible.
Akin's use of the phrase "legitimate rape", coupled with other comments of his, insinuate pretty clearly that he believes, though he provides no evidence or proof, either that rape must be violent to be "legitimate", or that some number of reported rapes are exaggerated by the victims. In fact, he appears to believe both of those things to some extent, though again he indicates no evidentiary knowledge of either one.
The assertion of the female body having mechanisms to shut down pregnancy as a biological response to violent rape, is perhaps one of the dumbest things ever to be uttered by a supposedly sentient human being. It betrays a complete lack of knowledge of history, particularly the history of warfare, where rape has been routinely used as a tool of war and conquest. One of the primary reasons we got involved in the Balkans in the late '90s, in addition to the Srebrenica massacre, was the widespread allegations of mass rape by military personnel. Again, rape has historically been the norm for conquering troops, as the easiest and quickest way to change the demographics of a conquered region.
More specifically, the statistical incidence of pregnancies resulting from rape is significant, and would seem to belie Akin's assertion of biological shutdown mechanisms. One would think that if it were that simple, there would be fewer than 32,000+ pregnancies per year resulting from rape. Maybe the mechanisms are broken; whatever the case, if they are not 100% infallible, one must ask if women -- adult women with their own identity and agency and rights, mind you -- can be trusted with the responsibility over their own reproductive health.
I don't have much patience with "civil" commenters such as "Hank" in the Politico comments, disingenuous tools who lament the callous incivility of intellectually dishonest liberals in practically the same breath as they launch some tired shot at Bill Clinton. Fine, Clinton was a cad and a dick, and his treatment of women has been execrable. That has no effect on the fact that Todd Akin is either a vicious liar, or an impossibly stupid person who has no business anywhere near a position of responsibility.
But the real issue here, as always, is control over the sex lives of women. Let's put it out there right now -- if any of this touched on the sex lives of men, there would be no debate, real or contrived. That shit is settled. Nobody tells us where or when to put our cocks. But somehow this bullshit persists over what women can or can't do with their junk. I think the main difference is that there are actually other women who assist in these stupid battles, where you would never find a man who would participate in repressing -- or even affecting, even a little bit -- our right to do what the fuck we want.
It takes a dickhead like Todd Akin to crystallize these nonsensical attempts to control the reproductive activities of women, but it is only with the active or passive acquiescence of other women that any of this stuff gains any traction. We can't do it without you, ladies.
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