By John Brummett
Since she now leads the tea party insurgence as well as polls in Iowa for the Republican presidential nomination, Michele Bachmann warrants our studied attention.
Prepare, then, to laugh and to cry, to be very afraid and to be very amused.
There is a timeliness and symmetry attending Bachmann’s emergence. It coincides with the nation’s looming economic calamity if reasonable adults can’t retake the Republican Party from the tea party-infected likes of her and Eric Cantor, that resister of tornado aid for Joplin, Mo.
Here’s a quick recap of Bachmann’s latest:
1. She said in a television interview that she hoped rising unemployment would elect her. So she hopes millions of you lose your jobs so that she can move to a better one. Or let’s extend the generosity of doubt. Maybe she simply lacks the ability to avoid saying incredibly ridiculous things.
2. Speaking of incredibly ridiculous things, she said in another television interview that she had been right to assert that our founding fathers fought tirelessly against slavery. She cited John Quincy Adams, a little boy and teen in revolutionary days. Again, to extend the generosity of doubt: Perhaps she simply can’t admit when she is spectacularly wrong.
3. She signed some kind of “marriage vow” put before her by fellow right-wing religious extremists and, therein, promised to ban pornography and lamented that slavery, while not good in a general way, at least kept African-American families together more effectively than is now the case.
4. She endorsed legislation to provide that, when the debt ceiling is not raised because of the irrationally zealous resistance of the likes of her, the federal government would first pay outstanding debts and the military and then figure out how to distribute the remaining money, which would be enough to cover only about 58 percent of current government expenditures.
Oh, and Social Security checks would not be affected and President Obama is lying when he says so, she bellowed.
But even Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell admits there might be validity to Obama’s assertion. And it’s not actually clear whether Bachmann even believes in the kind of socialism that is Social Security in the first place.
If you intend to pay debt and fund the military and keep Social Security’s status quo while limiting the rest of the federal government to 58 percent of continuing level funding, then you may find yourself in need of a veritable armada of death panels to squeeze Medicare into the budget.
Perhaps you are wondering why we should expend ink and newsprint on someone as obviously misinformed and misguided as Michele Bachmann. It is because she is merely the voice and face of the prevailing force within today’s Republican Party, the one that foments the looming economic calamity.
She will win the Iowa caucuses. Apparently she can be denied the presidential nomination only by Mitt Romney, who is approximately as phony as she is nutty, having taken both establishmentarian sides of every issue on which she takes a consistently irrational side.
Actually, conventional wisdom is that Bachmann might be contested for the leadership of the kook caucus by Texas Gov. Rick Perry. He ponders a presidential run while saying he intends to lead us in solving our problems by having everybody come to a football stadium in Houston in October to pray.
It says in the New Testament that the Pharisees were bad to pray in a publicly ostentatious way like that, making a self-serving spectacle of themselves and calling into question the sincerity of their supplication.
It says that, in response, Jesus spoke as follows: “But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and, when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father, which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.”
The best political understanding of prayer that I ever heard expressed was this: Former U.S. Sen. Dale Bumpers of Arkansas once said there always would be prayer in school so long as there were pop tests.
And there will always be prayer in America so long as Michele Bachmann can credibly seek the highest office in the land.
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John Brummett is an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and author of “High Wire,” a book about Bill Clinton’s first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com.
July 18th, 2011 at 2:23 pm
“It is because she is merely the voice and face of the prevailing force within today’s Republican Party, the one that foments the looming economic calamity.”
No, the primary cause of the looming economic calamity is that Progressives like John Brummett never met a non-Defense spending program they didn’t like.
And any attempts to cut, curtail or reform domestic spending over the past decades were always met with the obiqutious and demagogic accusations of “starving children” . . “throwing grandma into the street” . .. “killing puppies” etc etc
And let’s face it. . we’ve known for decades that this problem was coming. But it was the Progressives who created the nasty political climate that made reform impossible.
And now that the Progrssive entitlement state is collapsing under its own weight, Brummett has the nerve to engage in finger pointing. Maybe he should look in the mirror and admit that HE is part of the problem.
July 18th, 2011 at 10:39 pm
Progressives want to spend your money to grow the nation’s debt.
Let’s stop feeding the beast. Let’s stop the growth of a massive government whose size and scope are out of control. Taking even more money out of the economy through higher taxes in order to keep the tab running higher and higher is simply not an option. People who want to slow down the growth of government who oppose keeping government going through higher taxes are not mean, or crazy, or racist. Progressives are fomenting the looming economic calamity.
Obama said “begin again the work of remaking America” now we know what he meant. Putting our country on a very dangerous path that threatens to transform us into a Third World America.