What Is It With These People? (With Update)

First we have Todd Akin being force to walk back his "legitimate rape" comment, and now we have this character:

New Hampshire sheriff hopeful Frank Szabo on Thursday backed off his threat to resort to arrests and even deadly force to stop doctors from performing abortions if he is elected to office.

The Hillsborough County, N.H., candidate apologized for comments he made to local news outlets on Wednesday when he was pressed about how far he would go for his anti-abortion views. “What I said was inexcusable, and as sheriff, I would not use lethal force against an abortion doctor,” Szabo said in a written statement to the Bedford Patch.

The title of this post is actually a rhetorical question, because I know what is going on with these folks. Let me explain (again):

The GOP lost badly in the 2006 and 2008 elections. Lots of folks anticipated that the Republican Party would moderate in response to these defeats and move away from the far right policies of Bush/Cheney. Instead, the GOP chose to become even more radicalized than it was during the Bush Regime. A lot of this might have had something to do with the fact that the country elected a Black Democrat as president in 2008, but I digress.

This radical move to the right by the GOP scared folks like Mitt Romney -- who undoubtedly wanted to campaign on his one legislative success as Massachusetts governor (namely RomneyCare) but now can't even mention it -- and forced Republicans like Dick Lugar and others out of office because they had the gall to actually negotiate with Democrats, which magically turned them into "moderates" and thus made them unacceptable to the newly-re-radicalized GOP.

But the Republican hard-right turn gave folks like Todd Akin and the aforementioned wannabe sheriff the political cover they needed to tell us how they really felt about things. Or at least they thought it gave them political cover. They are now finding out otherwise.

Believe me when I tell you that Todd Akin still thinks that the female body, when legitimately raped, has ways to try to shut that whole thing down pregnancy-wise, and sheriff candidate Frank Szabo still feels that abortion doctors should be shot on sight.  I'm sure these guys routinely made comments like that when they were speaking with like-minded folks pretty much every other Republican, and their listeners probably agreed with them wholeheartedly.

Akin and Szabo, however, actually thought that such comments -- given the hard GOP lurch to the right -- would now be appropriate regardless of who the audience was, and this got them into trouble.  We've seen it before. Remember when Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) forgot he was on the House floor when he apologized to BP CEO Tony Hayward and said he was "ashamed" of the American response to BP’s oil spill and then described the creation of the $20 billion claims fund as a "tragedy of the first proportion"? Well, the GOP "Establishment" did not like that one bit:

The damage control was swift and the pushback severe — leaders in Barton’s own party threatened to yank his ranking-member status on the committee. Gulf-state Republicans seethed, and the top three GOP House leaders were compelled to put out a joint statement saying, “Congressman Barton’s statements this morning were wrong.”

It was really hard to blame Rep. Barton for this particular dust-up, given that Republicans were, at that time, routinely attacking Obama for demanding creation of the BP fund, but weren't openly doing it on the floor of the House because it simply wasn't politically expedient for them to do so.

I have no doubt we'll see a lot more of this during the run-up to the General Election. These kinds of things happen when you have a political party as schizophrenic as the GOP. Should be a fun next couple of months.

UPDATE:  Akin's campaign calls Fox News' bluff:

“The fact that Claire McCaskill is only polling at 48 percent after 72 hours of constant negative attacks on Todd Akin shows just how weak she is,” Perry Akin, the congressman’s campaign manager and son, said in a statement Thursday. “If she can’t break 50 percent after a week like this, Democrats should ask Claire to step down. Todd is in this race to win; we will close this gap and win in November with the support of the grassroots in Missouri and across America.”

The Akin campaign is responding to a Fox News poll which shows McCaskill leading Akin 48 percent to 38 percent. Senator McCaskill herself thinks that this particular poll is horseshit and was put out there to pressure Akin to drop out. Her Twitter response: “Rasmussen poll made me laugh out loud - if anyone believes that, I just turned 29. Sneaky stuff.”