If Republicans want to make sure they keep alienating themselves from half of the population and looking like the extremists they've proven themselves to be on the issue of abortion, please, please, please let former Rep. Todd Akin speak for them and keep rearing his ugly head for interviews on national television like this one. When a single one of them who are holding elected office right now speaks out against what Akin has been saying, I'll give them some credit for doing the right thing and pushing back at his extremism. Don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen any time soon.

Todd "legitimate rape" Akin was back out there, hoping for some more book sales on Chuck Todd's show this Thursday, and to Chuck Todd's credit, he did push Akin on his statements about "legitimate rape" and for trying to pretend he was taken out of context for his remarks.

Akin pulled the same stunt we saw during other interviews where he tried to portray his previous statements as just a "poor choice of words" and then turn the conversation to one where he's pretending that the Democrats are actually the ones waging a "war on women" while attacking Bill and Hillary Clinton with a bunch of already debunked conspiracy theories and smears. To his credit, Chuck Todd didn't let him get away with it and turned the conversation back on Akin and his extremist views on rape, contraception and abortion.

If Republicans would like to run on the platform Akin just laid out here, by all means, please proceed, wingnuts:

TODD: Do you believe there's ever an instance that abortion should be legal?

AKIN: I think that what doctors should do is to try to save life, okay? And as I earlier in that interview, I made it clear, there's a thing that's I believe called a tubal pregnancy, where the child has no chance to live and the child will kill the mother if the child grows there.

Now I believe that what you do is optimize life, you save the mother's life. Your objective is not to kill the child. Your objective is to save the mother's life.

I think that's the... if you'd call that an exception, then that would be an exception. but the points is you try to optimize life, because I believe that little children are special.

I don't know of anyone who would consider having surgery for a tubal pregnancy an "abortion" in the first place, but then, I don't hang around with the likes of Todd Akin or his ilk. Apparently he believes that's the only time a mother's life can be threatened by a pregnancy. I'm pretty sure a woman's health or ability to have children in the future fall way down his list of concerns as well.

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