Todd Akin has a new book. Like most books by politicians, it is about how awesome he is and how terrible all the people who are not him are. You know, a
summertime light read.
For now, Akin says one of his main missions is to shed light on the role the media play and what he sees as their unfair treatment of Republicans.
“I feel like I’m in a great position to do it since, one, I was a target of basically a media assassination,” Akin said in an interview Monday at a midtown Manhattan coffee shop. “I went from being a respectable congressman to being the biggest bum in the whole world in about two weeks.”
I'd quibble with the "respectable" part, but we'll give him the "bum" part. Akin was the one who posited that if a woman was raped, abortion was unnecessary because the "female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down." He maintains in the book that he's right about that, but no matter—it's all the fault of the media for reporting it and his fellow Republicans for not giving him a great big bear hug for his insights into femalefolk medicalisms. He says it's a media conspiracy, because of course it is.
Akin said he isn’t surprised by the negative response Republicans have had to his re-emergence.
“I believe they have a lot of fear about what I highlighted in the book, and that is a coalition between liberal Democrats and certain media elite that have the power to create a tsunami in the media over even a few poorly chosen words,” Akin said.
Akin said national GOP operatives also played a role. “The Republican establishment, they didn’t leave me on the battlefield, they came back and made sure to make sure I was dead.”
Hear that, Republicans? Todd Akin says the next time some Republican says a Really Stupid Thing, you'd better back him up on it. I agree. I don't know how the party currently decides which Really Stupid Things to support (climate denialism, lawsuits for presidentin', corporate religion-getting, Paul Ryan) and which not to, but it seems a bit arbitrary to me.