So Paul forcible-rape Ryan and friends called on Todd legitimate-rape Akin to drop out of the race. Otherwise, their plans to cut further taxes on conservative zillionaires by fucking over women will be endangered by Akin’s untimely quip about one branch of wingnut pseudoscience used to fuck over women. So far Akin has declined to drop out, and if he does the evangelical base will be miffed. Which means, today, we get to enjoy watching this unholy junta once known as the Republican Party teeter on the edge of a long coming and well deserved collapse. So far the GOP hasn’t come to terms with what they’ve unleashed, the elephant in the room, the reason women and any other half decent human being gets so pissed about this: there’s a bunch of fundies out there who think that 1) women lie all the time about being raped, and 2) there’s a chunk of them still living in ye olde Babylon — or modern day Saudi Arabia — who think it’s a woman’s fault when she gets raped. There’s a healthy number of social conservatives who hold rape victims in contempt, in part because of Old Testament bullshit and in part because rape victims overturn their carefully constructed apologetics where abortion is a black and white issue.
It’s that diseased, sick intersection between faith-based misogyny and cynical political expediency that seeks to victimize rape victims that turns most US voters off like a light switch. The smart conservative money knows this, they’re panicked because Akin just hung that revolting disease around the neck of the entire Republican Party and Romney’s VP pick in full view of the entire US electorate with election day only two and a half months away.
The only good news in this whole shitty mess is Ryan-Romney was already losing women badly. This will increase that loss, and they can’t win if they lose women voters by double digits. Well that and this could be the start of the final 10.0 earthquake in the fault line between the deluded religious base and the Kochwhores that have been exploiting them for fun and profit for the last 30 years.
But we’ve seen this movie before, the ending is not hard to predict: Akin will probably drop out, although the clock is ticking, he only has until 5 PM today, after being offered a plum high paying job at a conservative think-tank. The conservative establishment will continue to pretend to be shocked — shocked I tell ya! — until they think the story has died. Then their religious operatives will go right back to lying about rape and pregnancy and working their small government asses off to ensure rapists reproductive rights proceed unabated with the full power of the State behind them.
The question is this time, with our new improved progressive infrastructure, will the movie really end that way, or will it end in an earthquake? Which is to say, that’s a nice looking party you have there, Mitt (Not really). It’d be a damn shame if something happened to it …
Again the conservatives have an excellent opportunity for instructing the rest of us in how to shoot oneself in the foot.
Akin was on Huckleberry’s radio show yesterday and the Huckster prompted Akin to say that what he really meant was “forcible rape” instead of “legitimate rape”. Somehow, they both thought that was an improvement.
Yup. I’ve got a couple of friends who are conservative Christians, anti-choicers, the works — and even they are pissed off about Akin’s comment!
And yeah, as to “How does this movie end?”… I am skeptical that this will be the “earthquake” — in fact, I am doubtful that it will be a singular event like that — but I don’t think the GOP can hold together like this indefinitely. The Tea Partiers are the new Dixiecrats. Eventually, something’s got to give, because the radicals are costing them way too many votes. Hell, this should* be an easy election for the GOP, what with the state of the economy and other problems that the Obama administration is facing. And yet at best it is neck and neck, and it looks now like they might lose it. On basic political fundamentals, they should be fine, but the need to pander to the crazies (not to mention the fact that the party itself is now infested by crazies) is sabotaging the whole campaign for them.
* When I say “should”, I mean according to what we expect to happen in politics. If I were making a proscriptive judgment, I would say the Republicans “should” lose every election! :D
The Onion was all over this.
Sadly this moron still has a multi-percentage point lead in his election bid.
I think the death blow for the Republican Party was dealt 4 years ago… it’s just taking a long time to die.
Imagine an elephant that’s been shot several times in the chest. Lungs are punctured, bleeding is copious, and the beast is in a lot of pain. It’s afraid, obviously, and probably confused. Barely able to stand up under its own weight anymore, it instead thrashes violently but ineffectually. That the elephant will die is certain; it’s been wounded in a way that even immediate veterinary care might not be enough to save it. But it’s a very large animal, and incredibly powerful – especially when it’s fueled by the pain and terror of impending doom. Its instinct to survive is kicking into high gear now, but the poor thing doesn’t know what to do. So instead it thrashes wildly, making it a greater danger to those nearby than if it were still healthy and functioning.
So any time I hear some idiot Republican going on about “legitimate” rape or some other such garbage, I just think of that dying elephant and remind myself that the violent thrashing will be over and done soon enough.
Death blow, final nail in the coffin…we’ve been hearing about the demise of the Republican party for decades. It’s like Michael Meyers–it never dies. I don’t even see that it’s losing traction among women, certainly not among republican women, who have such strong faith in the “values” of the party, or at least in the bible-based dominance of the patriarchy, that they remain as true believers as ever.
The republicans have put on a nationwide effort to deny voting rights to the poor and non-whites, to prevent extended voting hours to pro-democrat regions (though they’re in favour of republicans getting more voting hours, vis-a-via TRMS).
Don’t be surprised of women are the next target of voter purges. There are plenty of republicans who openly say women shouldn’t speak in public. It doesn’t stretch credulity to say they’d try to prevent women from voting as well.
I wish the Republicans had been dealt their final death blow. Reality begs to differ. (Damn you, Reality! Damn you!) If they had been dealt such a blow 4 years ago, why the resurgence just 2 years ago? Granted, I don’t think that resurgence had as much to do with people agreeing with their positions as uninformed voters disappointed with the Democrats bought the crap the Republicans and Tea Party were selling.
That is an interesting prediction.
So be on the lookout for Republicans’ next legislative push to prohibit allowing children to accompany their parent into the voting station. Not just the voting booth, but children won’t even be allowed to stand in line with the parent. They’ll refer to the children as “non-voters” who have no business “loitering” and accuse them of potentially trying to vote fraudulently.
The sad thing is I can’t tell if my prediction is snark or an actual possibility.
Jordan Genso (#10):
There have already been tenuous and frivolous accusations of people registering under a false name. How hard would it be for a zealot to claim married women who took (or didn’t take, or got divorced) their husbands’ names are “registered under a false name”?
And I wasn’t being sarcastic or exaggerating in what I said. It’s not much different than what’s already going on.
Hell, Ann Coulter has already said that giving women the vote was a mistake.
” Well that and this could be the start of the final 10.0 earthquake in the fault line between the deluded religious base and the Kochwhores that have been exploiting them for fun and profit for the last 30 years.”
Thing is though that the fundy-base is too large a constituency to jettison and even imagine being able to win without. This is good news. The religious people are the ONLY people keeping the Rupublican party alive. The fundies ONLY care about social in(justice) issues, NOTHING else matters to them even if they pretend things like the economy and wars abroad matter as well. The ONLY way to keep the fundies around is to openly support hate and bigotry and misogyny. The Kockwhore republicans are finally getting a look at the 5 dollar whore they brought to bed with them in the early 70’s Hint: She didn’t age well.
Seeing as it’s now after 7pm, EST, and I haven’t been able to see anything about Akin dropping out, I suppose he’s still running. According to http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2012/senate/mo/missouri_senate_akin_vs_mccaskill-2079.html, he still has (as of 8/20) a 1 pt lead.
I certainly hope that that lead vanishes as more people hear what he said and are disgusted. But even if he wins, we can conjecture that his presence as a prominent Repub will resonate nationwide and cause more people elsewhere to be turned off.
At least Akin has distracted the public from Virginia’s governor Bob McDonnell vaginal probes.
“Shhhhhh! Our raging misogyny is a secret!”
Yup, all these Republicans expressing disappointment in Akin’s comments are really saying is, “Damnit Akin, why do we even bother to make code words if you aren’t going to use them? God! Next you’re going to be talking about ‘The Blacks’ or something!”
You may be right that we are being overly optimistic, but as far as losing traction with women, at least in the short term, the numbers confirm that. You’re right that among committed Republican women, the effect is small. But the numbers don’t lie: the GOP has a serious problem with uncommitted women voters right now. Whether that is lasting damage, or if it will go away after this election season, it’s too soon to say.
I think there are real signs of trouble for the GOP, and I think the reason people have been saying that for decades is because the seeds have been planted for decades. In the 80s, when the Republican Party chose to make an all-out push for religious voters by pandering to them on social issues (prior to that, a hyper-religious voter was just as likely to be a Democrat who saw social justice as an extension of her beliefs), that was essentially a deal with the devil that was going to have to come back to bite them at some point. The question is how long they can keep the sane-but-greedy plutocrats in charge while exploiting the loonies for votes. I think the debt ceiling crisis last summer is the answer to that question: At that point, the loonies had taken over the asylum, and the plutocrats could no longer hold ranks.
The GOP might get it back together still, but to do so they need to rein in the more nutty members of their party, and make sure they toe the party line.