"legitimate rape"

Todd Akin is a Missouri congressman and Senate candidate. And obviously a fuckwit of epic proportion.

I'm not sure what he meant, or even whether he knows what he meant. Bafflingly, wondrously stupid.

More on the story here.

UPDATE: The silver lining is that he's gone from being favourite to take that Senate seat to, er, not favourite.

UPDATE ii: The Guardian has a fascinating piece on the (literally) medieval thinking behind Akin's statement.

Comments

[N.Wells]

And he's leading in the polls.

And his ideas are not far from standard republican ideas: last year, the republicans tried to pass a redefinition of rape that was co-sponsored by Akin and Ryan, among many others).

[Tom]

I'm not sure this rises to the level of epic fuckwit-hood, more like garden-variety Republican cant gone awry. Akin was humming along, his mouth on autopilot, when a wire got crossed in his brain and the adjective "legitimate" - a perfectly fine and thoroughly focus-group-tested modifier when used in other contexts, such as welfare means-testing - got applied to rape. This kind of sloppy rhetoric is what separates bush-league Republican fuckwits like Akins from the party's epic stars like Paul Ryan. It's hard to picture him mixing clinical fiscal cant with red-meat emotional topics.