“This is not Tea Party versus the establishment,” Rove said on Fox News. “I don’t want a fight.”

"Some people think the best we can do is Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock. They’re wrong. We need to do better if we hope to take over the United States Senate. We need to get better conservative candidates and win," he continued.

Watch:

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In an effort to avoid a repeat of this in 2014, establishment Republicans have begun an effort to recruit more pliable candidates—ones who won’t sink GOP odds with ill-considered words on rape and women’s health. According to The New York Times, the “Conservative Victory Project” is “intended to counter other organizations that have helped defeat establishment Republican candidates over the last two election cycles. It is the most robust attempt yet by Republicans to impose a new sense of discipline on the party, particularly in primary races.”

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“They are welcome to support the likes of Arlen Specter, Charlie Crist and David Dewhurst,” Barney Keller, the spokesman for the Club for Growth, told Politico on Sunday.  “We will continue to proudly support the likes of Pat Toomey, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz.”

This points to an open question about the new Rove effort, which is being called the Conservative Victory Project: What criteria will it use to determine who is and isn’t electable?

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Daming Sanusi, a candidate for the Indonesian Supreme Court, has sparked widespread outrage by suggesting that rape victims "enjoy" being sexually assaulted.

In front of a parliamentary commission hearing to determine if he was fit for the high court, Sanusi was asked whether he believed the death penalty should be applied in rape cases. His response? "Consideration needs to be taken thoroughly for the imposition of death penalty for a rapist because in a rape case both the rapist and the victim enjoy it," CNN reported.

And why did he say something so colossally stupid?

He was nervous and wanted to "break the ice" with a "joke": "I made the remark without realizing it can harm people's feeling," Antara, the Indonesian news agency, quoted him as saying.

News of Sanusi's comments spread quickly through social media, prompting calls for officials to dismiss his candidacy.

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Right now, if you’re a woman in the military, which has startlingly high rates of sexual assault, and you get raped, you face the added insult of having to pay for an abortion out of your own pocket. That’s because the military's health insurance plan is the only one in the federal government that does not cover abortion in the case of rape or incest. It'll only cover the procedure if the woman's life is in danger

Democrats in the Senate have tried to change this, but House Republicans have so far resisted, thus producing two different bills -- one with the change and one without. Yesterday, the House named its representatives to a bicameral committee that will hammer out the differences between the two bills, including this provision. While killing the amendment could reignite the explosive abortion and rape debate of the summer, Republicans generally oppose the expansion of reproductive rights, even for raped female soldiers.

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But a fight is breaking out on the right over the precise significance of these defeats, and what can be done to avoid a repeat in 2014.

In the wake of this month’s election, the outgoing chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Texas Sen. John Cornyn, suggested the committee might junk its hands-off approach to Republican primaries going forward.

“What is the goal here?” he asked. “I think the goal is to elect principled conservatives in November, not just nominate somebody in the primary that has very little chance of getting elected in November. That doesn’t advance the conservative agenda, because you have to get elected before you can govern.”

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Politico reports that GOP leaders are working to prevent a repeat of this scenario by exerting more control over the nomination process. Republicans believe that they would have done better had they kept politicians like Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock out of the picture. The goal for the next four years is to erase the Tea Party-versus-Washington narrative that has made it difficult to get establishment Republicans through the primary process:

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While this trend transcends any one folly, Romney was the ideal, fossilized Republican awash in a fantasy golden age when bountiful bosses generated jobs and pampered laborers. Likewise, what bizarre political deviance tabbed Paul Ryan as more than a shrill ideologue with zero national clout? For the first time, both misfits atop a national ticket lost their home states. Remarkably, even that matchless twosome, McCain-Palin, outpolled (and outwinked) the votes to Romney-Ryan.

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"And," Hughes continues, "if another Republican man says anything about rape other than it is a horrific, violent crime, I want to personally cut out his tongue. The college-age daughters of many of my friends voted for Obama because they were completely turned off by Neanderthal comments like the suggestion of 'legitimate rape.'"

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After all, by then President Obama had already repeated that feminist mantra rejecting a hierarchy of rape: In August, he'd announced that "Rape is rape" in response to Todd Akin's blithe invocation of "legitimate rape." Three days after the words appeared on the Capitol, Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock's talk of rape and God's gifts gave the president occasion to say it again. Rape is rape. You could complain that this was still being debated in 2012, and many did, but why would profound disruption come fast or easy? No, it was an urgent dividing point, and the president himself had chosen a side.

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1. Indiana Senate : Republican state Treasurer Richard Mourdock (R) vs. Rep. Joe Donnelly (D). The most recent serious poll in Indiana shows that Donnelly has jumped ahead of Mourdock by 3 points, 45-42. Pundits are saying that if the GOP can't win this seat, GOP chances of taking the Senate are somewhere between slim and none.

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And while it's extremists like Richard Mourdock, Rep. Todd Akin, R-Mo., and Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, who received progressives’ derision for saying (and voting for) completely off-the-wall stuff, plenty of Democrats got in on the rape-denying, gun-loving, science-hating action, too. While these Blue Dogs might not want to repeal health care reform (well, except when they do), their records should still give you pause. Here are eight conservative Democrats who are hurting their party and their country -- but still want your vote.

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Just look at Indiana, a state that is choosing between two "pro-life" candidates, one of whom is a Democrat who has voted for House Republicans' most restrictive legislation on reproductive rights. Still, Joe Donnelly managed to avoid doing what Richard Mourdock did -- getting famous for talking insensitively about rape. They've been tied or within inches of each other for weeks, but as of today, the first post-rape-comment poll, Mourdock is down 11 points. Meanwhile, Mourdock's rape-talking fellow traveler in Missouri, Senate candidate Todd Akin, is locked in a race that was never supposed to be competitive, and a cash infusion may come too late to save him. And in Connecticut and Massachusetts, both abortion and contraception have been used to pummel relatively moderate Republicans with the ever-rightward agenda of the national party, and for that reason and more, it's looking like Democrats will prevail.

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First, there's Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin. You remember Akin, the guy who really got the right-wingers-saying-insane-things-about-rape ball rolling back in August. That's when he explained his stance on rape exceptions for abortion by authoratively declaring, "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down." Akin, who is now trailing his opponent Claire McCaskill – though not by as much as one might expect for a hulking ignoramus – has now unleashed a new ad featuring voters like Kelly, a single mother who says she's both had an abortion and "been raped in my past." Kelly goes on to say she's voting for Akin because he "defends the unborn."

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It's not easy being a down-ticket Republican with Paul Ryan a notch below the top. Democrats got plenty of leverage early in the fall pointing out Ryan's plans to voucherize Medicare and past designs on Social Security. As compiled in a roundup by the National Journal, the senate and House candidates who trot out their mothers (and to a far lesser extent, their fathers) to, well, vouch for them respond using the same discredited line that Romney-Ryan have: That it's Obamacare, not the Republicans, that are a real danger to Medicare.  And who is more credible than a sweet, white-haired lady who conveniently might double as a salve to the gender gap?

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I know what you’re thinking: Todd Akin, Richard Mourdock (pictured with Mitt Romney above) and their unfortunate habit of making comments about rape that drive voters away. No doubt, that’s a part of what’s happened to the Republicans in this cycle.

But as much as Republicans have a real nominations problem, one which probably will cost them more than just those two seats in this cycle, I see no sign at all that the party is going to learn any useful lessons from it. The problem is that the scope of the likely defeat is so broad that everyone is going to be able to find convenient targets for blame.

Remember, this was going to be an election cycle that set up very nicely for Republicans. Because we’re six years out from the 2006 Democratic landslide, the Democrats had to defend 23 seats while only 10 Republicans were up for re-election. Impending Democratic retirements in Nebraska and North Dakota made it seem that getting the three seats needed to reach 50 would be automatic, with the only question being whether Republicans could get close enough that 60 seats after 2014 would be well within reach.

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Even Romney’s running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan, held a no-exceptions abortion stance -- at least until Romney, who would allow exceptions for rape and incest, elevated him to the national ticket. As reported by TPM:

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This has been the year of “aspirin between the knees” and “legitimate rape,” the month of “some girls rape easy” and the awful, false claims that pregnancies are never life-threatening from Rep. Joe Walsh  (even after his colleague testified about her own life-threatening pregnancy on the House floor last year). This is the year that women in the military "should expect to be raped," the year of “abortions on women who aren’t pregnant” zombie myth, the year of maybe we should reconsider  incest exceptions to abortion bans . And now we have Richard Mourdock saying pregnancy by rape is "God’s will. ”So here’s the question: why do they keep saying these things? It’s 2012, and these statements about rape, abortion and sex are actually really energizing for their opposition--they pull middle-of-the road voters away from the group they see as “extreme” and toward Democrats, who seem more reasonable, understandable and moderate on social issues. So why does ill-advised stream-of-consciousness ranting continue?

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“I don’t know how these guys come up with these ideas,” Obama told Jay Leno. “Let me make a very simple proposition. Rape is rape. It is a crime. And so these various distinctions about rape don’t make too much sense to me, don’t make any sense to me. The second thing this underscores, though, is this is exactly why you don’t want a bunch of politicians, mostly male, making decisions about women’s healthcare decisions.”

On Donald Trump, Obama joked that they knew each other growing up in Kenya: “We had constant run-ins on the soccer field. He wasn’t very good, resented it. When we finally moved to America, I thought it would be over.”

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