Robert Cohen/St. Louis Post-Dispatch/ZumaPress.com
Todd Akin won’t stop talking. And he won’t stop talking about rape. On Thursday, the former Republican Missouri congressman and failed Senate candidate—best known for suggesting that the female body could self-terminate a pregnancy in cases of “legitimate rape”—appeared on MSNBC’s The Daily Rundown to talk about his new book, Firing Back, and to explain why he was totally right about the rape thing. During the 10-minute spot, he insisted that “legitimate rape is a law enforcement term.” (He did not cite a source for this.) And he pointed out that Bill Clinton was accused of committing rape and “assault on women,” yet the former president was applauded when he delivered the keynote speech at the 2012 Democratic convention. “Seems to me, it’s a Democratic war on women,” Akin remarked.
Contradicting his comment about a woman’s ability to “shut that whole thing down”—that is, to prevent conception following a rape—Akin claimed that he “had a number of people” working on his Senate campaign who “had been conceived in rape.”
