No, a candidate misspoke in the stress of the moment and said "legitimate" when the proper word was clearly "bona fide."
He was factually correct, in everything that he said. His mistake was in assuming that the average person is as well-informed on the issue as he.
The uninformed media misrepresented what he said and jumped all over him. And the Republican establishment joined in the jumping.
If you ever wonder why conservatism is losing ground, it's because of this. Republicans and conservatives are too quick to throw people on the bus when the media criticizes them. It doesn't matter if the person didn't do anything to deserve criticism. The media uses the tactic to take down conservatives because it works. Until Republicans and conservatives learn to stand up to the media--to point out that the media lies--to use language as emotionally charged as that of the left, but in defense of the truth--and to defend our own--we will keep losing.
In Indiana, candidate Mourdock claimed that it was God's will when women got pregnant from the act of rape; probably the media's fault that anyone was offended by that comment too.
These guys were not the innocent victims of some wholly unforeseeable conspiracy of the Bilderburger media cabal. They were, instead, breathtakingly unprepared for big time politics and showed it badly at their public debates.
I had the unpleasant experience of listening to the whole Mourdock - Donnelly debate; Mourdock was rude, ill prepared and inarticulate throughout the entire evening. Indiana elected conservative Republicans to 2/3 of its congressional seats and to the Statehouse in the 2012 election; that we didn't elect a conservative Republican to the Senate was the candidate's fault, not the media's.