Eyes popping out of head. Jaw dropping onto floor. Grabbing onto large, inanimate object to steady myself. Gasping for air. Yes, Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akin (see videos above for recap of his original remarks) is married to someone who compared criticism over those now-infamous comments to British soldiers raping colonists in 1776. 

Maybe she didn’t like Karl Rove suggesting, “We should sink Todd Akin. If he’s found mysteriously murdered, don’t look for my whereabouts!”

But comparing GOP leaders to rapists? Then again, these are not your average, everyday middle-of-the-roaders. Team Ryan-Akin tried to completely eliminate women’s reproductive freedom (so much for that “personal freedom” conservative talking point) and redefine rape as only “forcible”… as if any rape is something a woman would want, agree to, or encourage.

Ryan may be Etch A Sketching a little on that front, but now he’ll have to distance himself a little further unless he wants the radical “raped my daughters and wives of American colonists” comparison to rub off on him, too.

Via the National Journal, where we see that wife Lulli is no fan of her own party’s leaders:

“Party bosses dictating who is allowed to advance through the party and make all the decisions—it’s just like 1776 in that way.”

She cited colonists who “rose up and said, ‘Not in my home, you don’t come and rape my daughters and my … wife. But that is where we are again. There has been a freedom of elections, not tyranny of selections since way back. Why are we going to roll over and let them steamroll us, be it Democrats or Republicans or whomever?” Obama and Mitt Romney “both seem to be embodying” a British monarch, “with all the tactics that they’ve been revealing” toward her husband, Lulli Akin said. “Are they that dissimilar?” she asked. “Are they really dissimilar? They say with their mouths ‘free enterprise’—but, really, how free?”

Asked about comparisons of his plight to revolutionary Americans, Todd Akin called it “a little more grandiose than the way I would say it.” But he seconded the theme, citing “this tremendous sense of uprising I feel among the people I talk to,” that “ ‘We made a decision, and [even if] I didn’t even vote for you … it was a legitimate race.’ ”

Talk about legitimate extremists. Claire McCaskill better win this one. She may be a Blue Dog, but she’s no Akin.