By Kevin Foley
Much was made of Rep. Michele Bachmann's Tea Party rebuttal of President Obama's State of the Union speech, but what caught the eye of many was her talk before an anti-tax crowd over the weekend in Iowa, where she is sounding out her presidential chances.
Bachmann |
While her rebuttal signaled a deep rift among GOP lawmakers, Bachmann (R-MN) signaled her astounding ignorance of American history when she declared that the Founding Fathers had "…worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States."
Of course, many of those great men were slaveholders, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. They embraced the "peculiar institution" of slavery, they didn't fight it. Their peers who opposed slavery eventually settled for the noxious "three-fifths" compromise in the Constitution for the sake of unity.
She's probably aware that the Civil War was fought about four score and seven years later, but does Bachmann know why?
Poll one hundred sixth graders and 99 of them will give you the right answer, but the representative who leads the Tea Party's caucus in the U.S. Congress is evidently clueless about why there was a bloodbath at Gettysburg.
I'd be shocked, but by now we know reason and intellect take a back seat in the Tea Party, where irrational anger and mob rule preside. Still, shouldn't a Republican know the GOP was founded in 1854 by a coalition of anti-slavery parties determined to keep the peculiar institution out of America's territories?
Bachmann will no doubt blame the "elite liberal media" for her latest bout of verbal flatulence, but it's not the first time her brain was disengaged from her mouth. The Tea Partier who would be president has revealed herself on many occasions to be, shall we say, out there:
"I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out: Are they pro-America or anti-America?"
"Carbon dioxide is portrayed as harmful. But there isn't even one study that can be produced that shows that carbon dioxide is a harmful gas."
"There are hundreds and hundreds of scientists, many of them holding Nobel Prizes, who believe in intelligent design."
Her views are ambrosia to Bachmann's Tea Party base, where making sense isn't always sensible. So it's doubtful the Minnesota grizzly mom's presidential aspirations will suffer much damage over her belief that John Quincy Adams may have signed the Emancipation Proclamation, at least in Tea Party Paradise where such facts are fluid.
More rational voters, however, might have their doubts about Bachmann's viability.
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Kevin
Foley is president of KEF
Media Associates, an Atlanta-based producer and distributor
of sponsored news content to television and radio media. |