Vote Bachmann off the island
Michele Bachmann needs help.
She
needs a grammar tutor, a history lesson, and maybe some diversity
sensitivity training. But more than anything else, she needs a tour
guide who can lead her to the exit doors of this Republican presidential
race.
She's
a bigoted, right-wing, anti-government evangelical extremist, and her
campaign, despite the early guidance of Ed Rollins, still has yet to
recognize the inherent philosophical conflict of having a candidate who
boasts, simultaneously but without irony, of being a Constitutionalist and a stalwart Creationist.
She's
running as a Tea Party candidate despite the Tea Party's embarrassing
approval rating, and though she benefits from the same mocking media
attention that made Sarah Palin a national icon, the majority of
Americans can't take her seriously, as her five percent polling numbers
very clearly demonstrate.
We
pay attention, Democrats at least, not because we're concerned,
patriotic, and open-minded Americans and she's a viable candidate whose
opinions elevate the foreign and domestic policy debates of this
presidential election, but because, at heart, we're all blood-thirsty
sadists who cackle in response to her gaffes and cheer like stoned frat
kids at a football game whenever she steps forward claiming to represent
the Republican Party.
It's
not just her falsifications that are despicable, it's the desperation
in her shrieking voice whenever she's on stage attempting to debate with
domestic policy wonks like Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul, or true
evangelicals like Rick Santorum, or foreign relations geeks like Jon
Huntsman. She's out of her league, and everybody but Bachmann knows it.
It's
time for the GOP field to start shedding its third-string candidates,
and for that five percent of Republicans who consistently tell pollsters
that Bachmann is their favorite presidential contender, the straw that
ought to break their backs came on November 12 during the CBS News/National Journal debate on foreign policy.
In
response to a question asking whether or not she would allow the use of
torture if she were miraculously elected commander in chief, Bachmann
responded with an unequivocal "Yes."
"If
I was president, I would use waterboarding because it was effective,"
she said. "Barack Obama is using the ACLU to run the CIA. We have no CIA
interrogation anymore. It's as though Obama has decided to lose the War
on Terror."
I'm
not one so quickly to forgive those who shamelessly butcher the English
language, but in this instance her usage of the past-tense conjugation "was" where she should have used a past tense subjective "were" in
conjunction with the future-tense auxiliary "would" is secondary to the
grave offenses and utter falsehoods of this statement.
The entire response is bullshit.
1) Waterboarding isn't effective, and there is no evidence whatsoever to suggest otherwise.
2)
The crack on the ACLU is commonplace among Republicans but not
necessarily logical. The GOP's criticism and skepticism of the ACLU is
akin to McCarthyism, and yet no conservative would ever acknowledge the
utter hypocrisy of demagoguing an organization that represents Americans
whose civil liberties, as guaranteed in the Constitution, have been
violated. As a factual statement, this is absurd.
3)
Remember the big media blitz following President Obama's executive
order banning all guns of every kind in every city in America? Really?
You missed it? It was front-page news in every paper in the country! It
ran as a split banner story next to the other big news item of the year –
the story about how the United States has stopped interrogating
prisoners of war. It was a good article. Look it up on Google by typing "CIA ends interrogation."
4)
On this one, Bachmann has a point. If Barack Obama's decision to end
the United States's egregious violation of international law by
discontinuing the Bush Administration's uses of "cruel and unusual
punishment" isn't proof that Obama has "decided to lose the War on
Terror," then the sky isn't blue and the earth is a one-dimensional
triangle. Never mind that Obama killed Osama bin Laden and Anwar
al-Awlaki. Never mind that he facilitated the emancipation of the Libyan
people from a murderous dictator. The fact that Obama has given an
emphatic thumbs down to waterboarding is evidence that he's a secret
Muslim spy who's aiding future terrorist attacks on American soil.
Stupid
people barking anti-government bromides are entertaining in the short
term, but when it comes time to elect a president, or a vice president,
intelligence matters. Michele Bachmann has none.
She's
more than a slow-motion car accident. She's an eccentric, talent-devoid
sideshow performer competing for the lead role in the psychobabble
routine in an already overcrowded and unpopular Republican presidential
political circus.
Being
on the Intelligence Committee obviously doesn't require intelligence,
because if it did Bachmann would know that practically drowning
prisoners of war is significantly less effective in extracting useful
information than promising virgins in heaven. And being a mother of 28 –
which Bachmann has made the core of her candidacy – obviously isn't
seen by the majority of Americans as a prerequisite for being the leader
of the free world, as public opinion polls made clear a week after
Bachmann won the Ames, Iowa straw poll and (very, very) briefly spurred
national speculation of her possible-but-never-realized frontrunner
potential.
There's
a reason she's polling near the bottom of the pack, but there's no reason
for her to continue this crusade. She should drop out of the race and
go back to doing what good evangelical conservative Constitutionalist
Creationist bigots do when they're not vying for the presidency –
introducing obsolete bills in Congress reaffirming the dollar as the
official U.S. currency, spreading conspiracies about how Sharia law
might one day "usurp" the U.S. Constitution, and helping her husband
cure gay people of their affliction.
Bachmann
is an embarrassment to all who have ever taken pride in calling
themselves Republican. It's time she gets voted off the island, and it's
past time the voters in the sixth congressional district of Minnesota
get a grammar tutor, a history lesson, and some diversity sensitivity
training so they can vote this pock mark on the American government out
of office.
The world would be a better place.
(Cross-posted at Muddy Politics.)
Labels: 2012 Republican presidential nomination, Michele Bachmann, Republicans, torture, war on terror
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