My article from the August 23, 2012, issue of Front Page Magazine:
Obama’s ‘Legitimate Rape’ Lifeline
By Matthew Vadum
The recent “legitimate rape” statement by Republican Senate candidate Todd Akin has now metastasized into a matter of far-reaching political implications. Few dispute that the comment exhibited deep intellectual incompetence, and the entire conservative establishment unanimously agreed that such a person has no business representing the conservative cause. Nonetheless, Akin refused to budge. In so doing, a once assured Senate seat has been put in play, while the Obama campaign and the Left have already unleashed a torrent of propaganda to conflate Akin with all conservatives, reviving the “war on women” leitmotif and even trotting out Sandra Fluke for the occasion.
Anyone who’s been spelunking the past few days may have avoided the incessant media coverage of what Akin said. To recap, in an exhibition of extraordinarily poor judgment and stupidity, the veteran lawmaker committed a major unforced error. Instead of simply airing his otherwise respectable pro-life views, Akin attempted suicide-by-reporter on a local television show. He faced a routine softball abortion question about pregnancies resulting from rape that is posed to all conservative candidates and he blew it.
“From what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare,” Akin said of rape-related pregnancies. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”
It’s not just Akin’s bizarre and callous choice of words in reference to “legitimacy” and rape that served as the problem — but also his fringe view that the female body can somehow differentiate between welcome and unwelcome male reproductive cells.
Is this man really a candidate that a resurgent conservative movement wants on a podium?
Akin is an amazing fellow. In a race with an already unpopular incumbent, it takes a special kind of sorcery to trade places with the Democratic underdog by uttering a few stupidly-chosen words.
Yet Akin has done precisely that, giving a windfall of free ammunition to the Left. Although the congressman has repeatedly apologized in interviews and in TV commercials for his now-infamous senior moment, his career-ending words have become a Democratic slogan, a chant that the Left is repeating 24/7 to discredit conservatism as a political ideology.
No matter the outcome of the presidential election, every Senate seat matters in order to guarantee the repeal of Obamacare, a bureaucratic monstrosity designed to euthanize what’s left of America. Right now the Left holds 53 Senate seats compared to 47 seats on the Right. Although a year ago a conservative takeover of the upper chamber seemed a near-certainty, the polls have since tightened.
Akin may still win his Senate contest, but his comments cast the conservative movement in a bad light. The ramifications could be vast. This could make it much harder for patriotic Americans to save this ailing republic. In the future, Mitt Romney, already a squishy conservative, may think twice about embracing robust conservative policies. The ripples go on and on and on.
It is not hyperbole to say that we’re going to be hearing Akin’s asinine words for the rest of our natural lives. The Left will never, ever let them go even though they do not represent — by any means — mainstream conservative thinking.
“They have been pushing this war on women thing forever,” conservative doyenne Ann Coulter said on Sean Hannity’s radio show. “They had nothing until now. Now they’ve got something. Every Republican is going to be asked about this.”
Maureen Dowd is already babbling on about a “Taliban creed” or something in the New York Times and MoveOn has sent out a mass email to the “7 million members” it claims to have. The email subject line reads, “Mean-spirited and intolerant.” The email declares that “Representative Todd Akin’s comment about ‘legitimate rape’ was no gaffe. It was a glimpse into the GOP War on Women.” MoveOn plans to waste GOP campaign resources by presenting a pointless “massive petition” to the Republican presidential ticket today.
The Alinskyites at MoveOn proclaim that “This shameful moment is our best opportunity to draw attention to the dangerous woman-hating agenda of the Republican Party and expose it to American voters.” [italics in original]
President Obama took time out from his PGA tour in order to portray his opponents as cave-dwelling whackjobs.
“The views expressed were offensive,” said Obama. “Rape is rape. And the idea that we should be parsing and qualifying and slicing what types of rape we are talking about doesn’t make sense to the American people and certainly doesn’t make sense to me. So what I think these comments do underscore is why we shouldn’t have a bunch of politicians, a majority of whom are men, making health care decisions on behalf of women.”
On cue the Obama campaign just sent out a mass email in which abortion activist Sandra Fluke, a poster child for the Left’s politics of distraction, is once again lying about her favorite topic. This media-savvy cheerleader for government-provided contraceptives who grossly exaggerated how expensive they are in order to score political points is dishonestly arguing that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are “in lockstep with Akin on the major women’s health issues of our time” even though that presidential ticket has loudly condemned Akin and demanded he quit the race.
Michael Tomasky, who is just one strident soldier in an army of vicious left-wing propagandists, is falsely claiming that Congressman Paul Ryan, now the GOP vice presidential contender, shares Akin’s strange belief. It should surprise no one that Tomasky, whose publication Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, is funded by radical anti-American philanthropist George Soros.
And all of this is only the beginning.
The Akin contretemps comes at an especially bad time considering that Democrats are desperate to get voters worked up about social issues in order to distract from the pain and suffering that their economically illiterate policies have wrought. Dangling shiny, sparkly objects like the make-believe “war on women” in front of the public is the only hope that leftists have at keeping the White House and retaining the Senate.
Akin’s Olympian face-plant also comes at a time when social issues are temporarily at the forefront of national politics. It was just a few days ago that a gay activist shot up the headquarters of the staunchly pro-life Family Research Council’s headquarters in Washington, D.C.
It needs to be pointed out that in terms of electoral politics, it doesn’t matter that the basest of hypocrites are among the Democratic faithful. It doesn’t matter that some liberals don’t consider statutory rape to be rape — depending on who the accused person is. (See Whoopi Goldberg’s bizarre “it’s not rape-rape” comment in defense of fugitive film director Roman Polanski’s pederasty.)
It doesn’t matter that Democrats embrace serial sexual abusers Bill Clinton (an accused rapist himself) and the late Ted “Chappaquiddick” Kennedy. (And let’s not forget Clinton was impeached and that Kennedy engaged in secret, self-serving correspondence with the KGB, but I digress.)
It doesn’t matter how sorry Akin is for his remarks. “One word, one sentence, [on] one day out of place and all of a sudden the entire establishment turns on you,” said Akin as if someone forced him to say what he said. This is not a case of hypersensitive feminists or pro-abortion activists making a mountain out of a molehill. Akin pulled the pin on his own grenade.
At this point, it doesn’t matter that it’s not fair. It doesn’t matter that there is a perennial double standard. It doesn’t matter that Democrats get away with murder all the time. It’s politics and as somebody once said, politics isn’t beanball.
If America is to have a chance of surviving, Obamacare must be completely excised from the body politic. The future of the nation should not depend on an undisciplined backbench congressman who thinks his political future is more important than America’s.
Those who understand the minutiae of state election law say Akin’s last chance to get off the Missouri ballot is September 25.
History will be kind to him if he does the right thing. Akin still has an opportunity to fall on his sword for the good of America.