Michele Bachmann – The new Sarah Palin

Well, not necessarily new, Michele Bachmann1 been as wilfully ignorant as Sarah Palin for a while, but an apt comparison nonetheless.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdjRFJQuoiI

“I find it interesting that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat president Jimmy Carter,” said Bachmann. “And I’m not blaming this on President Obama, I just think it’s an interesting coincidence.”

Here’s what I find interesting: Michele Bachmann is so partisan or so stupid (or both) that she thinks she’s actually being coy enough not to be called out on this insidious piece of shit.

Gerald Ford was president during the 1976 swine flu outbreak

[From Daily Kos: Your new Sarah Palin]

February 5, 1976, per Wikipedia.

On February 5, 1976, an army recruit at Fort Dix said he felt tired and weak. He died the next day and four of his fellow soldiers were later hospitalized. Two weeks after his death, health officials announced that swine flu was the cause of death and that this strain of flu appeared to be closely related to the strain involved in the 1918 flu pandemic. Alarmed public-health officials decided that action must be taken to head off another major pandemic, and they urged President Gerald Ford that every person in the U.S. be vaccinated for the disease

Ms. Bachmann also is a little confused about American history:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jc1kvcf4w-M

As a matter of fact, the recession that FDR had to deal with wasn’t as bad as the recession Coolidge had to deal with in the early 20s. Yet, the prescription that Coolidge put on that — from history — is lower taxes, lower regulatory burden, and we saw the “Roaring 20s,” where we saw markets and growth in the economy like we’d never seen before in the history of the country. FDR applied just the opposite formula. The Hoot-Smalley Act [sic], which was a tremendous burden on tariff restrictions. And then, of course, trade barriers, and the regulatory burden and tax barriers. That’s what we saw happen under FDR that took a recession and blew it into a full-scale depression. The American people suffered for almost ten years under that kind of thinking.

So here’s the media note on this dumbass: First off, recognize that she speaks in Palinesque gibberish. “A tremendous burden on tariff restrictions?” What?

Worse still, as TPM’s Eric Kleefield correctly points out, the Smoot-Hawley tariff bill — not “Hoot-Smalley” — was signed into law by Herbert Hoover (R), not FDR. The lead sponsors of the measure, Sen. Reed Smoot and Rep. Willis Hawley, were both… yes, you guessed it… Republicans.

Again, from Wikipedia, since you were probably curious too:

The act was pioneered by Senator Reed Smoot, a Republican from Utah, and Representative Willis C. Hawley, a Republican from Oregon. When running for president in 1928, one of Herbert Hoover’s many campaign promises to help beleaguered farmers had been to raise tariff levels on agricultural products. Hoover won, and Republicans obtained comfortable majorities in the House and in the Senate in 1928. Hoover then asked Congress for an increase in tariff rates on agricultural goods and a downward revision in rates on industrial goods.

The House passed a version of the act in May 1929, raising tariffs on agricultural and industrial goods alike. The Senate debated its bill until March 1930, with many Senators trading votes based on their states’ industries. The conference committee then aligned the two versions, largely by moving to the higher House tariffs

But hey, what’s a little ignorance? I’d hazard a guess that more than half of the current Senators and members of Congress would fail a college-level history test, miserably. Congresswoman Bachman is just one of those easily-ridiculed ignorant, smug, faux-Christians I thought we were done with once Bush’s thousand year rein crumbled.

Footnotes:
  1. a proud Oral Roberts degree holder, ’nuff said []

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