Akin's Permanence, Huckabee's Sick Mumbo-Jumbo

Just a fascinating coincidence, is it not, that just as we're talking aboutTodd Akin's remarks, the GOP platform committee was sitting down to write the abortion plank that includes, according to CNN's scoop, no exception for rape or incest.

Now, this is not especially different from 2004 or 2008. The difference is that in those years, a Republican congressman who just won a hotly contested Senate primary, and who sponsored radical rape legislation with the party's vice-presidential nominee, didn't try to tell us there was such a thing as "legitimate" rape. And we did not learn, in those election years, that the view that the female can will an egg not to fertilize is in fact more widely held in GOP circles than those of us on planet Earth would have thought. That's what they call a new context.

It is said that nobody cares what's in a party platform. That's because the other side rarely makes a big stink about them. In this case, Democrats and other c4 groups ought to be going to town with this from now until election day. This is where the women's groups need to step in with "issue" ads in the key states.

And let's be clear. These Republicans calling for Akin to stand down aren't offended. They're scared shitless that he's going to hurt the ticket. Period.

On a related front: I really don't quite know what to make of this. Mike Huckabee had Akin on his radio show yesterday and commisserated with him about the fact that some beautiful human beings are, as the phrase goes, products of rape:

The former Arkansas governor and onetime GOP presidential contender suggested a couple of cases in which he suggested that rapes, though “horrible tragedies,” had produced admirable human beings.

“Ethel Waters, for example, was the result of a forcible rape,” Huckabee said of the late American gospel singer. One-time presidential candidate Huckabee added: “I used to work for James Robison back in the 1970s, he leads a large Christian organization. He, himself, was the result of a forcible rape. And so I know it happens, and yet even from those horrible, horrible tragedies of rape, which are inexcusable and indefensible, life has come and sometimes, you know, those people are able to do extraordinary things.”

And Adolf Hitler was maybe the product of a night of beautiful and perfect and rapturous marital love-making between Alois and Klara. Does that tarnish rapturous marital love-making? No, and Ethel Waters, fine as she was, doesn't redeem rape. It's really twisted and sick mumbo-jumbo to try to pass this off as part of God's plan.