Michele Bachmann's History Lesson

I was upset because Egpyt erupted into chaos and knocked off the State of the Union and the Republican and Tea Party rebuttals from the Sunday morning political shows. I wanted to hear Chris Matthews call Michele Bachmann a balloonhead again. And then there was Sarah Palin's sputnik moment when she conflated 30 years of history into one sweeping incident. Bachmann is really showing herself as an attention whore. She tried to get a major position in the Republican-led House. When they turned her down, she reached for another gambit--appointing herself head of the Tea Party and rewriter of American history.

The sad thing is the media is bypassing a perfectly legitimate concern of the Tea Party types--the deficit--and drowning it out by spending hours and hours concentrating on the fact that Bachmann looked into the wrong camera and gave a whacko interpretation of the last 300 years. I commented on it on the Huffington Post and some right-wing nut responded that the National Embarassment from Minnesota was technically right. Huh? In her speech in Iowa, Bachmann said the founding fathers worked tirelessly until slavery was eradicated. She specifically sited John Quincy Adams. First of all, JQ was not a Founding Father. His dad John Adams was. JQ was an anti-slavery advocate and did work to get slavery outlawed in the District of Columbia when he was a congressman, after losing his second term from President to Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson--I loved the musical.

Maybe she saw Amistad and got confused. That was that movie with Anthony Hopkins as JQ Adams where he defends the hot model who was playing a slave who rebelled. Or maybe when she was a little girl, she watched The Adams Chronicles on PBS with William Daniels who played JQ. The same actor played the father John Adams in the stage and movie version of the musical 1776 and they did try to outlaw slavery in that show, but the mean old Southern representatives put a stop to it. But somehoe I doubt Bachmann saw 1776 on Broadway; maybe she saw the movie on the local Minnesota channel on the fourth of July.

Anyway, she made it sound like all the Founding Fathers worked to end slavery. Sorry, but they didn't. Some were against it, but the institution didn't end until the Civil War, several generations later. The FFs kept it in the constitution and counting slaves as three-fifths of a person was NOT a meaure to start on the road to equality, but to get the Southern states bigger representation in the Congress. Glenn Beck actually ranted on Chris Matthews for calling Bachmann an idiot. Beck actually said he thought Bachmann could become president. Now I know he's nuts.