At this mile marker along the long and sinuous road to the White House and Capitol Hill, the Republican party’s election jalopy is starting to show signs of strain. Most of its tires are out of air. Its windshield is so caked with splattered bugs that no one can see out of it and no one will use the Devil’s mechanical fingers (windshield wipers) to clean it off. Karl Rove keeps falling asleep at the wheel and Todd Akin ate a gas station egg salad sandwich a few weeks ago and has had to be sequestered in the back. Now, in the wake of Mitt Romney’s piñata swing of criticism against the White House in the wake of deadly attacks in Egypt and Libya, Republican Senator Jon Kyl (AZ) has thrown up all over the jalopy’s chauffeur by saying that a statement from a U.S. Embassy condemning an anti-Muslim movie was pretty much the same as blaming a victim for rape.
The Embassy’s statement — apparently issued before attacks in Libya that killed four American diplomats — had criticized the low-rent, shitball movie by a guy called “Sam Bacile” that depicts Muhammed as, among other things, a pedophile. Kyl, quoted at length by Roll Call’s Meredith Shiner, found the Embassy’s statement to be, from his myopic perspective, most uncool:
It’s like the judge telling the woman who got raped, ‘You asked for it because of the way you dressed.’ OK? That’s the same thing. ‘Well America, you should be the ones to apologize, you should have known this would happen, you should have done – what I don’t know – but it’s your fault that it happened.’ You know, for a member of our State Department to put out a statement like that, it had to be cleared by somebody. They don’t just do that in the spur of the moment.
Set aside the complete awfulness of what Kyl is saying for a moment and forget ideology: who’s stupid enough to cast their lot in with a party that’s this politically inept? It’s been less than a month since Todd Akin firebombed his campaign for the U.S. Senate, and now, right when election season is about to kick into gear and blast through the toll plaza without paying (yeah, extended metaphor), Jon Kyl says something so inane and insensitive that it almost seems like he’s gaslighting his GOP colleagues. And no, a U.S. Embassy condemning a horrible movie by a guy who’d fail a high school film elective is not the same as a judge blaming a victim for rape.
@meredithshiner [TwitLonger]
Jon Kyl: Embassy Statement Was Like Telling A Raped Woman She ‘Asked For It’ [TPM]
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