Posted on 08/25/2012 12:09:20 PM PDT by kreitzer
Prediction: If the GOP establishment doesn’t follow Republican Rep. Todd Akin’s example with a big, fat apology – to Akin – the whole party goes down in flames come November.
I don’t mean every Republican will lose, but there is great political peril in not sealing the hole in Republican armor that has opened in Missouri and instead permitting it to remain a Democratic pressure point. Further, “for the good of the country” (the mantra accompanying the party-wide chorus of pleas to Akin to drop out of his U.S. Senate race), Republicans must resume funding Akin’s viable campaign ASAP, after cutting it off in a mad fit of political pique. Finally, every one of them – the party standard-bearer, party bosses, congressional delegations, allied pundits – should come together for a group smack on the head, as in, “What were we thinking?”
I can’t recall anything in public life more widely craven and uncalled for than the open panic and bullying set off across the Republican Party by the first replay of Akin’s perplexingly ignorant interview comments on rape and pregnancy. The veteran conservative lawmaker, former engineer, former businessman and grandfather of eight recanted these remarks. He apologized for them.
But as the left began to bay for blood over a Republican and, by preposterous extension, Republican Party it hopes to smear as “anti-woman,” Republicans across the board, incredibly, joined in. Rather than jouncing Democrats back into some semblance of decent behavior with a firm, party-wide reality check – comparing a dumb comment about rape from one among their ranks with, say, accusations of actual rape against Democrats’ two-term hero, Bill Clinton – Republicans obligingly cut off their own noses and handed them to their political opponents.
The headline in the New York Times this week said it all: “GOP is pressing candidate to quit over rape remark.” Funny how we never, ever saw anything similar in the 1990s, when bombshells about Bill Clinton’s serial sexual harassment and assault of women were a common occurrence. Something like: “Dems pressing president to quit over rape.”
Didn’t happen. In fact, far from “pressuring” the former president into a quiet post-presidency retirement, the Democrats are spotlighting the overexposed sexual reprobate with a center-stage role at their upcoming convention. There, Clinton will officially re-nominate Barack Obama for president.
What else can we expect from the party that still lionizes Ted Kennedy, the late Massachusetts politician who notoriously left a young female campaign worker to drown in a sinking car rather than get help? Just as serial sexual improprieties perpetrated by Bill Clinton don’t count in Democrat-land as “anti-woman,” neither does Kennedy’s unconscionable behavior at Chappaquiddick. Both men not only remained in office, they remain the Democrats’ ideal.
A muddled, recanted remark about reproductive biology, however, puts a Republican one or two steps away from Hitler. He must be shunned by “decent” society, his whole career destroyed, the primary votes he won nullified, to expiate his “sin.”
Worst of all is the Republican Party’s unified acquiescence to this illogical, unjust and amoral equivalence. In fact, without the GOP’s lockstep, take-me-to-your-leader obedience to the Democrats’ rigged rules, the pitch of this controversy would have died down already. Without the Republicans’ vigorous enforcement of the left’s double standards, Akin would probably still be facing favorable odds of winning the Missouri Senate seat.
But no, which is what deeply concerns me. Indulging ginned-up, hack hysterics is not the behavior of a leader or a winner. Worse, accommodating unjust attacks on a solid citizen in the name of practicality or the “greater good” is a very dangerous precedent, as totalitarian history tells us. That’s why the GOP needs to rethink Missouri and make amends with Akin before “moving on.” Otherwise, I fear that in its vital quest to prevent Barack Obama from winning a second term, it won’t be moving anywhere.
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Syncro, if this thread and the others on the same subject aren’t enough to wake you up, you are hopeless.
These clowns will march to the MSM’s orders right off the cliff.
Perhaps, but we're talkin' politics, not Marcus Welby, M.D.
So what, exactly is your point?
It would appear that few people appreciate good satire any more.
Why don’t you stick to the anti-freeper sites then?
They spew the same stuff.
I’m sure they will seem smarter than FR members to you.
This 65 year old , 12 term politician needs to step aside, and let some other conservative have a turn.
“If you believe that you need some education. Even an argument between husband and wife, when she is at peak fertility can prevent fertilization.
I don’t know what you’re even trying to say WRT rape, but what Akin said is largely true. the presence of the sperm and egg in the uterus does not guarantee fertilization. Stress chemically inhibits it.”
Ok, I’ll bite. Just what are your credentials as far as reproductive health goes? I never said a woman gets pregnant if the egg and sperm are together in the uterus. Be factual. I said if the sperm penetrates the egg, which is correct.
Akin was incorrect in his statements, I think you and possibly 4 others are the only people left still defending his statements. Rape victims do have a higher rate of miscarriage, but that is quite different from getting pregnant. To my understanding, there has never been a reliable study of rape victims and pregnancy. If you know of one, please link it.
That one has to know the act they are in to play it right.
I voted for Brunner, but subscribe to Levin's take. Akin will get my vote. The witch has to go and,IMO, any vote not for him is a vote for her.
Still, I wish his utterance had never occurred.
There is more to being a winning candidate than being prolife.
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Oh yeah ???
Its the best start I know of...
Its ALWAYS my first litmus test...
I wont vote for a child abuser like Willard...
"He’s a perfect fit for the GOP-Massachusetts..."So was Romney and look at the mess we are in now?
No one running for president except Obama and his mini-me
“Akin...and wasn’t takling about “crisis pregnancies.”
I don’t want to be overly contentious here, but he’s talking about pregnancies that might result from a violent sexual assault. Even by his own reasoning those can occur.
Now, if that is not a crisis pregnancy, what is?
I’ll give my full disclosure here: if I knew a woman who had gotten pregnant as the result of, let’s not mince words at all, violent stranger rape, I would advise that she should carry the pregnancy to term and give the child up for adoption.
I see abortion as an assault on your body, and I don’t see that following one assault with another is a good thing.
That being said, as a political matter I support keeping the rape and (this is bogus, but whatever) incest exceptions. I think we generally agree on “life of the mother”, but if we don’t I support that exception also.
And, quite frankly, if some woman wants to go a lie and say she was raped and that’s why she needs an abortion, I just can’t get too excited about that.
I’m afraid we are always going to have abortions, we’ve always had them. Often enough people do bad things, no matter the law, no matter the custom, no matter the consequence.
What I find disturbing about the modern abortion ethos is that it is considered “ok” or better or more normal or more healthy than pregnancy.
I’ll grant that Mr. Akin may be a well intentioned person, but so far he’s not helping.
Maybe he’ll do better as time goes along. I hope so.
But Republican support in Missouri for the party’s likely nominee has fallen from 94% in late July to 85% now,”
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Yes they see how Willard ande his GOP goons suck when it comes Conservative issues like abortion and supporting their own man who is pro-life...
Why is he going to lose...because his remarks will bring out pro death democrats who would have overwise stayed home and watched dancing with the stars. Of course Republicans will vote along party lines, but Missouri has never been a realiable Republican state...thus Clare. The rats needed no help. Akin is help.
Your sarcasm is totaly out of place.
You have to know exactly what I stand for after all these years, and until lately, I thought that I knew your positions too.
Nothing either of us has ever posted is anti-freeper, but the positions of the Akin attackers clearly is. There is not one single solid freeper among them. At best they are weather vanes.
“As a 12 term congressman he has a 97% ACU rating as of 2011. The highest in Congress I think.”
Yup, he’s a strong conservative. This is why other conservatives and Republicans were so quick to make a big deal out of Akin’s dumb comments: They didn’t want his blunder to be seen as representative of *all of us*. Democrats are eager to paint all Republicans as medically ignorant and insensitive about rape, so Democrats want Akin to stay in, as a poster boy for right-wing Bidenisms, and Missouri Republicans want Akin out.
No, Akin was not incorrect in his statements. You’re playing the GOPe game, and that is sad.
How, exactly would you propose to run your study of rape and pregnancy? I’d love to laugh, but I cannot.
“But, with continued bashing, how lucky will republicans be?”
McCaskill has $10 million to bash Akin every day until election day, she is holding back because she doesnt want him so destroyed he drops out. how lucky will Akin be after that?
Make yourself useful, prepare a conservative candidate that can be accepted by all stripes of conservatives. Forget about RINO. Try to convince fellow conservatives. If your candidate cannot even persuade fellow conservatives to vote for him/her in the primaries, don't dream about winning the general election. More importantly, stop behave like whinny liberals. "Woe of me...! RINO wronged me!"
What?!? Akin was not incorrect?!? Even Akin admits his junk science statement was wrong. Akin was repeating junk science from a source with a political agenda. Rape does NOT lead to lower fertility rates, it was and is medically wrong and ignorant to suggest it does and numerous studies contradict it:
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/2012/08/21/todd-akin-challenged-by-doctors-on-rape-and-pregnancy/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8765248
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