Rep. Todd Akin has certainly worked out how to get himself into the news, via his unbelievably asinine, stupid and uneducated utterance on rape.
However, as has been pointed out already, it is not as if Rep. Akin suddenly left the reservation with his most recent comments. He has been making these sorts of incendiary and/or moonbattish statements for many years. So far this election cycle, he has been busily churning out all sorts of odd and bizarre verbiage.
He is also expressing a view that has been in wide circulation for a long time. This is an important point to be stressed - Todd Akin is not an outlier in the ranks of authoritarian nitwits. The view he was expressing is one that is held by a large number of people in the modern USA. This should worry a lot of people; my fear is that it will not worry anywhere enough people for an epiphany to occur that holds a magnifying glass up to the underlying value systems that perpetuate this sort of nonsensical, anti-scientific, borderline sociopathic viewpoint.
The context of Akin's absurd and demeaning comments lies in the abortion debate, one of the great fault lines that crosses American life. This comment at Popehat, for me, encapsulated a lot of the underlying truth that generally gets swept out of the way as large numbers of people of loud conviction and limited reasoning ability shout past each other.
UPDATE - Jim Wright over at Stonkettle Station, as part of his evisceration of the Akin Follies, also asks the more pertinent question of why no media figure has put Akin in the spotlight and asked him for some facts to back up his ludicrous assertions. The posting reminds me again of why I think that most of the media outlets in the modern USA are about as much use as a chocolate teapot.
UPDATE 2 - Here is a biting satire of many of the authoritarian nitwit attitudes to women and sex...