This morning, the former Congressman took his infamous commentary about “legitimate rape” to MSNBC’s Daily Rundown, alleging that he didn’t mean that their are certain biological functions that determine the legitimacy of rape. Instead, he said, the phrase comes from law enforcement.
“It’s a law enforcement term,” Akin said. “A woman calls a police station, the police investigate. She says, I’ve been raped, they investigate that. So before any of the facts are in, they call it legitimate case of rape. But they use the word just legitimate rape.”
“It’s an abbreviation, as I said, legitimate rape means legitimate case of rape,” Akin continued. “If I had been choosing my words better, I should have said legitimate case of rape. And I have acknowledged that it was a poor choice of words.”
Despite calls from both Democrats and Republicans for Akin to go away, he has been adamantly attempting to explain his comments with the release of his book Firing Back this week. In an interview with The Daily Beast on Monday, Akin acknowledged that he choose his words poorly.
“You know, poor choice of words,” Akin said in the interview. “But we deal with that right up front [in the book] and talk about it and acknowledge that it was a poor choice of words. But I never intended to diminish women or to in any way diminish the seriousness of the crime. Nor did anything I say really do that.”
Akin might be the only person who thinks that.
Since some passages of the book have emerged online, even Republicans have run away from Akin.
“Todd Akin is an embarrassment to the Republican Party and the sole reason Claire McCaskill is still part of Harry Reid’s majority,” said Brian Walsh, a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee during the 2012 election cycle.
Akin has been given every opportunity to apologize for his remarks, perhaps appeasing his peers even if he himself doesn’t think his comments were baseless and offensive. Oh and he doesn’t.
“Exactly what was so terrible?” Akin asked The Daily Beast. “I had young people that were the children of rape working on my campaign. They understood what I was saying and I was trying to stand up for them and their rights. I didn’t think we had done anything near so evil as what the media was carrying to absurd heights. So the final decision was to do an apology not for what I said, but for what everybody perceived I said.”
Akin told MSNBC’s Chuck Todd the same thing Thursday: he had campaign staffers born as a result of rape. And when he was asked whether abortion should be permitted in instances where a woman has been raped, Akin responded with a rhetorical question:
“Should a child conceived in rape have the same right to life as a child conceived in love?”
He proceeded to answer his own question by referencing the members of his campaign staff who had allegedly been conceived by rape as if their presence lends credence to his argument that every life is precious.
In the book, Akin who conceded today “I’m not presenting myself as a doctor,” cites medical research to back up his claims about the female body.
“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,” Akin writes in Firing Back. “Doubt me? Google ‘stress and infertility,’ and you will find a library of research on the subject.”
Akin doesn’t feel that he needs to apologize because he thinks he got a bad rap from the vicious liberal media, who allowed “credibly accused rapist” Bill Clinton to deliver the keynote speech at the 2012 Democratic convention. Nor did the media once call out Hillary Clinton for laughing during a 1975 trial in which she defended a 12-year-old girl who had allegedly been raped, he said. Instead, as the Democratic party proliferates a “war on women,” they choose Akin as the sole scapegoat.
“I never did anything to harm any woman,” Akin told the Daily Beast. “I believe that liberal Democrats and the liberal media is, in a sense, using unwary voters as pawns to advance an agenda that is very hostile to America.”
Akin retiterated this sentiment about his perceived Democratic war on women during his Daily Rundown segment this morning.
When he was asked why he would put himself back into the limelight, underneath the microscope of the media he so vehemently hates, Akin said.
“It’s always been my interest to try to promote truth. The good ideas that bring the best out in people.”
The opposite also applies.