Michelle Bachmann, the Congresswoman from Minnesota, and leading ear-splitting spokesperson for the latter day tea party “revolutionaries” who have made it their mission to destroy what they don’t like, including Social Security, Medicare, Unemployment Insurance, Collective Bargaining, and more, may fairly be compared to the heartless foul-tempered Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland.
For those who prefer their politicians uncivil, Michelle’s for you.
For those who like their political rhetoric long on shrill and short on facts, she’s the one.
For those who love exhortations that give flight to violence and revolution, that’s Minnesota’s Michelle.
Politifact who tries to keep our public discourse honest and accurate by uncovering false and misleading statements by pols (of all persuasions) has found our latter day Huey Long mimic’s pronouncements “pants on fire” false and “ridiculously false” more often than any other politician.
Of late, Virginia parents have been rightly upset that history textbooks in the South side couldn’t get the number of states in the confederacy right, wrongly stated that blacks fought for the confederacy, and didn’t know when the United States entered World War I.
That’s nothing, however, compared to the historical constitutional whoppers that Congresswoman Bachmann published at her maiden presidential campaign stop in Iowa last week.
Michelle claimed this nation enjoyed diversity at its founding and slavery was “tolerated.” According to James Madison’s notes, South Carolina Judge John Rutledge said at the constitutional convention in 1787 that, if the constitution forbade slavery, the Southern states will never agree to the constitution. South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun said slavery was a “positive good.” The Congresswoman also said that the nation’s “founders” worked “tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States.” Actually, the founders were long dead when slavery ended in 1865 in the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. We’d like to assume the Congresswoman was taught better than this white wash at the Coburn School of Law at Oral Roberts University.
George Orwell said, “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity… [w]hen there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims …”
Back home, where “Fargo,” the movie, was filmed by the Coen brothers, Michelle took to the air waves on WWTC-AM to say, “I want people in Minnesota armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax because we need to fight back.”
There are some, like the backward parents in the movie, "Footloose," who fear harmless teenage dance music but have no qualms about inciteful rhetoric.
Others insist that what we say doesn’t matter but, don’t kid yourself, fighting words prompt violence, first shouting down members of congress, dehumanizing them, spitting on them, threatening them on the phone and in e-writings, breaking into their offices and shooting at them – as in Tucson.
On April 5, 1968, a short time before Senator Robert Kennedy was shot and killed, he said in Cleveland that, as a nation, “we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike’ and “[w]e make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire weapons and ammunition they desire.” He could have been talking of Michelle when he said, “Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them.”
John P. Flannery
It's hard to believe that individuals like Michele Bachmann and Betsy McCaughey continue to thrive when their statements are so patently and demonstrably false. McCaughey isn't much more than a side show freak, but Bachmann is a member of the U.S. House which puts her on a much larger stage and makes her all the more dangerous. Whose sounding board is she? A member of the House only since 2006, she raised 13.2 million dollars in the last election cycle, more than John Boehner, and, presumably, most of it from outside Minnesota.
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