What to make of Michele Bachmann? She's getting a lot of attention for her inability to find the right camera while delivering the official Tea Party response, also known as the first alternate official nonofficial Republican response, to the President's state of the union address last week. The out-of-power party, whose spokesman is relegated to some deserted room with an American flag dragged in and propped up behind him, never fares well in this January match-up; it appears to have been another stroke of Bachmann's genius to multiply the invidious comparisons.
But better yet, by my measurements, is the speech she delivered to an Iowa anti-tax group on her recent visit to the venue of the first presidential contest of 2012. She might have said, in different ways, again and again, that tax collection is theft by swindle, but the audience already knew that and so, continuing in her professorial manner, she endeavored to enlighten them on the topic of their country's formative years, especially as it relates to slavery and racial discrimination.
You could not say that her analysis was unnuanced. On the one hand, slavery was an "evil," a "scourge," a "blot," and a "stain on our history." On the other hand:
We also know that the very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States. . . . Men like John Quincy Adams would not rest until slavery was extinguished in the country.
I don't know. Is she an idiot? Mentally ill? Just has no regard for the truth? What are the other possibilities? It's not as if she was speaking off the cuff. The little bit about John Quincy Adams is a nice absurdist touch. He was 9 on the day his father signed the Declaration of Independence and he had been dead for 15 years when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Close enough on all counts!
Did you know that "Europe remains as a piece of real estate"? Check it out.
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