Todd Aiken

Try this: Google “Todd Akin rape.” When I did, I got 297 million results.

Now, Google “Bill Clinton rape.” That nets 7.5 million results.

Funny thing is, nobody has accused Akin of rape.

True, the Missouri Senate candidate displayed his ignorance of human physiology in an interview Sunday. He also showed a disturbing lack of sensitivity to rape survivors.

In response to a question about whether abortion should be legal after rape, Akin said:

It seems to me, first of all, from what I understand from doctors that’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, uh, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something. You know, I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist, and not attacking the child.

Rep. Akin’s ignorance of human physiology is neither surprising nor particularly disturbing. A degree in Anatomy and Physiology has never been a prerequisite for either House, after all.

His apparent lack of interest in the victim of the crime is disturbing, though. He mentions both the rapist and the child, but his only nod to the pain of the woman involved is a distant reference to “the female body.”

But I feel as if we’re all in the audience of a filmed-live TV show. Our handlers hold up signs–Laughter, Applause, Booing–and we respond on clue. Our media handlers whip us into a frenzy over Akin’s boorish remarks. But they remain unruffled by the insensitivity of his opponent, Missouri Senator Clare McCaskill.

Clare McCaskill and the pain of preborn children

McCaskill has voted to protect abortionists’ killing of girls in the womb solely on the basis of their sex. She has voted to continue late-term abortions: abortions in which we know the preborn child feels pain.

Just a tad bit insensitive to those girls. And to near-term babies of both sexes as they are poisoned or hacked to death.

If Akin’s too insensitive to be in the Senate, what should we say about McCaskill?

Bill Clinton’s war on women

And is it worse to speak insensitively about rape, or to rape? There’s a large body of evidence to suggest that Bill Clinton was, and may well still be, a long-term sexual predator.

Bill Clinton

In 1999, the non-partisan political news site Capitol Hill Blue ran an article entitled, “All the President’s victims: Bill Clinton’s long history of sexual violence against women.” In a five-month investigation, two journalists found 17 women who alleged that Clinton had sexually assaulted them.

The earliest alleged rape–of 19-year-old Eileen Wellstone–occurred in 1969 while Clinton was at Oxford. The most recent allegation, at the time of the 1999 article, was made by White House volunteer Kathleen Willey. Willey reported in a 60 Minutes interview that Clinton had grabbed her, fondled her breast and pressed her hand against his genitals in the Oval Office in November, 1993. The paper corroborated the women’s accounts in numerous interviews with retired State Department and Arkansas State employees, former Yale and University of Arkansas students and others.

Juanita Broaddrick was one of the 17 women identified by Capitol Hill Blue. Here’s an excerpt from her 1999 NBC Dateline interview with Lisa Myers:

Myers: Had you, that morning, or any other time, given him any reason to believe you might be receptive?

Broaddrick: No. None. None whatsoever.

Myers: Then what happens?

Broaddrick: Then he tries to kiss me again. And the second time he tries to kiss me he starts biting my lip (she cries). Just a minute. . . . He starts to, um, bite on my top lip and I tried to pull away from him. (crying) And then he forces me down on the bed. And I just was very frightened, and I tried to get away from him and I told him ‘No,’ that I didn’t want this to happen (crying) but he wouldn’t listen to me.

Myers: Did you resist, did you tell him to stop?

Broaddrick: Yes, I told him ‘Please don’t.’ He was such a different person at that moment, he was just a vicious awful person.

Myers: You said there was a point at which you stopped resisting?

Broaddrick: Yeah.

Myers: Why?

Broaddrick: It was a real panicky, panicky situation. I was even to the point where I was getting very noisy, you know, yelling to ‘Please stop.’ And that’s when he pressed down on my right shoulder and he would bite my lip.

When everything was over with, he got up and straightened himself, and I was crying at the moment and he walks to the door, and calmly puts on his sunglasses. And before he goes out the door he says ‘You better get some ice on that.’ And he turned and went out the door.

Myers: On your lip?

Broaddrick: Yeah.

Myers: Is there any way at all that Bill Clinton could have thought that this was consensual?

Broaddrick: No. Not with what I told him, and with how I tried to push him away. It was not consensual.

Myers: You’re saying that Bill Clinton sexually assaulted you, that he raped you.

Broaddrick: Yes.

Myers: And there is no doubt in your mind that that’s what happened?

Broaddrick: No doubt whatsoever.

While Akin is being pressured to withdraw from the race, Clinton is scheduled to deliver the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention.

I understand if you’re disturbed by Akin’s remarks. I am, too.

But which upsets you more: his words or McCaskill’s votes to continue the slaughter of even pain-capable babies? His words or Clinton’s apparent pattern of long-term sexual predation and violence?

Let’s wave off our handlers and think for ourselves. Let’s have the integrity to be consistent.

And let’s save our rage for the really big stuff.