July 10, 2014

Todd Akin's back and the excerpts from his book were so awful that Joe Scarborough couldn't even bring himself to read all of them aloud in the segment above. Republicans would be happy if "legitimate rape" Akin would just go crawl under a rock somewhere, but with the release of his new book, it doesn't look like that's going to happen any time soon.

From Politico: Todd Akin returns to national stage:

Todd Akin takes it back.

He’s not sorry.

Two years after the Missouri Republican’s comments on rape, pregnancy and abortion doomed his campaign and fueled a “war on women” message that carried Democrats to victory in the Senate, one of the few regrets he mentions in a new book is the decision to air a campaign ad apologizing for his remarks.

“By asking the public at large for forgiveness,” Akin writes, “I was validating the willful misinterpretation of what I had said.”

And when it comes to his infamous line about rape and pregnancy, that “the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down,” he writes defiantly: “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. “Doubt me? Google ‘stress and infertility,’ and you will find a library of research on the subject.”

“Firing Back: Taking on the Party Bosses and Media Elite to Protect Our Faith and Freedom” hits bookshelves July 15. An advance copy was provided to POLITICO by a source involved with the book.

Akin argues that he could have defeated Sen. Claire McCaskill in Missouri, despite his comments, if it weren’t for the piling on from both liberals and conservatives. He compares his situation sympathetically to that of George Allen, who lost a Senate race in Virginia after calling a liberal tracker a racial slur. And he accuses liberals of hypocrisy for asking Bill Clinton to headline the Democratic National Convention. Read on...

Scarborough also seemed shocked that Mike Huckabee wrote the forward to Akin's book and is out there defending him. He seems to have deluded himself into believing that Huckabee is not just as big of a wingnut as Akin. He's obviously not been paying much attention to him for years on end now if he believes that Huckabee isn't a "crackpot" as he put it, just like Akin.

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