LATEST UPDATE: Now Mitt Romney, after having been told that Akin's comments were pissing people off, has decided he more than simply "disagrees" with them—he's downright offended. See how easy it'll be to adjust his controls if elected?

UPDATE: Romney/Ryan "disagrees" with Akin's comments. DISAGREES? They couldn't even muster a legitimate condemnation. Disgusting. 

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Missouri Rep. Todd Akin—who is running for senator against sitting (conservative Democratic) Sen. Claire McCaskill, today made a shockingly ignorant claim, one that in my opinion should really disqualify him from serious consideration just based on intellectual grounds: He asserted that women who are "legitimately raped" rarely get pregnant because a woman's body is equipped not to allow that to happen. In reality, over 30,000 women a year who are raped become pregnant, but men like Akin (and many women, too) believe abortion is never justified, so rape victims should be forced to give birth to those children.

He later came out to say he "misspoke."

There are many occasions on which politicians and other public figures say something politically incorrect or genuinely misspeak (or are deliberately misquoted), but this is an honest-to-God expression of something he believed to be true, and to believe a medical statement like this at his age exposes a woeful lack of cognitive activity. I hope McCaskill rides this all the way to an Election Day victory in a race where Akin had been ahead of her in many if not most polls until now.

This so reminds me of when I used to work at a department store called The Fair Store in a very black area of Flint (that is now as desperately poor as it gets). The young white staff I was hanging out with consisted of several people who got into a discussion and asserted that blacks and whites shouldn't make babies together because that often led to children being "swirled." And they honestly believed it.