Fox’s Bob Beckel makes a lame rape apology

Watching a bunch of Fox News commentators discuss rape is like watching Jonah Lehrer talk about journalistic ethics. It’s vaguely amusing, but it’s ultimately just going to make you angry and depressed. Such was the case earlier this week, on “The Five,” when the network’s token liberal-who-gives-liberals-a-bad-name Bob Beckel made the world’s worst argument against concealed weapons — and then followed it up Thursday with a weak non-apology for a comment he made about rape.

It was a conversation about guns that sparked Beckel to travel the road of absurd logic. He started off well enough, addressing the “carry laws around a lot of states” and the issue of guns on college campuses. “If you do that,” he said, “it seems to me the chances of people getting killed …” After his colleagues jumped into the fray on the subject of women and self-defense, Beckel lobbed back, “When was the last time you heard about a rape on campus?” His remark earned a hearty round of “WHAAAAAA?” from the panel, and pleas that campus rape is “rampant.” Beckel took his mighty rhetorical shovel and dug himself in deeper. “Rampant?” he sniffed, incredulously. “Date rape, yeah, that’s one thing,” he said, “but are you going to take a gun out and shoot your date?”

Beckel’s remarks come just days after Democratic Colorado state Rep. Joe Salazar had to issue his own apology for some ill-phrased remarks on rape, guns and college students. During a debate over a bill that outlaws concealed weapons in university buildings, he said, “You don’t know if you feel like you’re going to be raped, or if you feel like someone’s been following you around or if you feel like you’re in trouble when you may actually not be, that you pop out that gun and you pop … pop a round at somebody.” After a flurry of criticism and mockery, on Monday he explained, “We were having a public policy debate on whether or not guns make people safer on campus. I don’t believe they do. That was the point I was trying to make. If anyone thinks I’m not sensitive to the dangers women face, they’re wrong. I am a husband and father of two beautiful girls, and I’ve spent the last decade defending women’s rights as a civil rights attorney.” None of which, by the way, qualifies him to decide whether a woman merely “feels” like she’s in imminent danger.

Beckel, meanwhile, is a man whose agility at putting his feet in his mouth is impressive even by Fox News standards. Just earlier this month, he groused that “after swimming, my eyes blew up and made me look Oriental.” And last year, he referred to the patrons at a Mitt Romney fundraiser in Israel as “a bunch of diamond merchants we don’t know the names of.”

http://www.salon.com/2013/02/21/foxs_bob_beckel_makes_a_lame_rape_apology/

So a fake liberal, who has no history of supporting liberal policies, on a FAUX noise show apologizes for something he was probably coached to say?

When will somebody finally sue FAUX noise for perpetuating fraud?