Rewriting history has been standard practice for the Republicans since Reagan.  That is the point where they left reality and began “creating their own.”

In Orwell’s 1984, the evil government forced thousands to rewrite history that had become inconvenient for politicians and high-ranking Party members.

But thanks to the Free Enterprise System, and the Invisible Hand of the Marketplace, and Patriotic Real Americans, we’ve dispensed with the need for Big Government to take care of “correcting” history.  Rugged Individuals — motivated purely by a deep love for their country and a deep respect and appreciation for those politicians who believe in the Idea of America as a Special and Unique Country — take care of this necessary task all by themselves.

And that’s what makes America great!...

Eh. I think this might just be the semi-humorous vandalism for which anonymous IP editors are known, rather than springing from any deep wellspring of Bachmann support. The IP who was tagged with changing the John Quincy Adams page suggested as much on his/her talk page.

Asshole is a wonderfully descriptive word, especially since it has so many handy adjectives lying around just itching to modify it.

Screaming
Gaping
Ever-widening
Polluting
Brown-eyed
Lazy
Clueless
Demented…

...I’m starting to sound like Bubba from Forrest Gump

What saddens me profoundly is that neither Bachmann nor the people who support Bachmann know the slightest bit about the history they pretend to revere so deeply.  The fact is that there was at least one Founding Father who was steadfastly opposed to slavery:  Benjamin Franklin.  Franklin signed a letter, along with the Pennsylvania Quakers I think it was, to Congress that caused a big stir.  They asked the newly formed United States Congress to end the practice of slavery.  The prominence of that signature, Franklin being the only man in America who approached George Washington in terms of being universally respected, was such that it threatened the fragile democracy, which was only able to be formed because the non-slave states agreed to the Great Silence (Article 1, Section 9, Clause 1 of the Constitution…look it up), as well as some other provisions regarding the slave trade.  Southern representatives would not even discuss abolishing slavery and only the slave trade, the importation of new people into the United States, made it into the Constitution, and then only to provide rules against discussing ending the trade or taxing it.

For Bachmann’s supporters:  there are lots of books that discuss slavery, the slave trade, and the founding of the United States.  Pick one up.  Read it.  Remember what it says.  Get one from a real historian, not one of Glenn Beck’s pulp fiction pieces.  I like Joseph Ellis when it comes to the founding of the country.  His work is pretty authoritative and scholarly, but very readable.

They can’t back Ben Franklin.  He liked fucking and the French, and was also a scientist.  Basically, everything they hate.

The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. Instead of altering their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views…

which can be very uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering.
~The Doctor

Also, if they read actual books about slavery, they would discover uncomfortable ideological lineages to their own that they don’t want to deal with.

Who needs to read when there’s people like Bachmann who will tell you everything they need to know?

Reagan?  Yeah, that’s why everyone knows about the massive soldier driven unrest after the Civil War and WW1 and WW2 and how the US Army tried to move homesteaders off their land in UT with religious extremist rhetoric as cover for their support of the robber barons/mine conglomerates.  ‘Cause they’ve been rewriting history since REAGAN.

This article was written about Canadian politics (our Dear Leader, ladies and gents) but reflects US ones and in fact sources GWB staff. Nothing surprising, nothing new, but still chilling to see it spelled out like this so…consciously.

http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2011/05/23/HarperReality/

Money quote:

Journalist Ron Suskind, writing in the New York Times magazine, described a remarkable encounter with one of Bush’s senior aides. Suskind related how he was criticized by the aide for being a member of “what we call the reality-based community” as contrasted with Bush’s “faith-based community.” This reality-based community, said the aide, was made up of people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” Suskind nodded in agreement and started to reply when the aide intervened, “That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

Most of the Founding Fathers liked fucking and were fond of the French.  Washington’s friendship with Lafayette was strong and continued throughout his life.  Jefferson, a staunch anti-Federalist, was a scientist and reputedly liked to fuck too.  Jefferson’s library, housed at the Library of Congress, is filled with scientific literature.  I’ve been there and I read the titles of the books, many of which were in Greek and Latin (and you know what the Greeks are known for).

As for the ideological lineage, I don’t know what the teabaggers would recognize (I don’t pretend to read minds, just books), but the fact remains that slavery was an economic system and that slaves were not needed for labor as much as for equity.  There is a definite ideological lineage between the teabaggers and southern plantation owners.  I’d elaborate, but I’d probably bore most of you.

They can’t back Ben Franklin.  He liked fucking and the French, and was also a scientist.  Basically, everything they hate.

And a Deist. 

But really, the Franklin most of us know is the “Benjamin Franklin” who was the main character of the Autobiography, and so was probably a little more idealized than the actual man.  Which fits right in with the Teabagger ethos, where fictional reworkings of history are more revered than actual history.

I’m pretty sure the rightmost party has been rewriting history since about fifteen minutes after political parties were invented.

Reagan?  Yeah, that’s why everyone knows about the massive soldier driven unrest after the Civil War and WW1 and WW2 and how the US Army tried to move homesteaders off their land in UT with religious extremist rhetoric as cover for their support of the robber barons/mine conglomerates.  ‘Cause they’ve been rewriting history since REAGAN.

The end of the civil war soldier’s unrest has been well covered.  WWI was a collapse of the economy after being in war-time production for over a decade and was relatively small.  WWII is more arguably covered up by historians but even then if you search for “Hooverville” there is a small sub-genre of books written on it.  The same goes for the great Utah massacre (who’s proper name eludes me at the moment).  Heavy research has been done on it relatively recently.  Odds on most Americans alive today either lived through the consensus history era (from 1950-1970) or the post-revisionist era (1990-Present).  They tend to favor a central narrative and while both are center-left as a movement, the issue with showing unrest is a difficult one for people to express appropriately.

That being said, we’ve reached a point with the GOP and their voters that reality need not matter anymore, they simply want to feel good.  The last hurrah before they die off but they want to try and bring everybody else down with them.

Ugh….her son has a mullet!

I cant believe in the midst of being caught lying she lets out another one!

The problem is when women like her play into an unenlightened publics stereotypes about women and it ends up negatively affecting girls.

http://beta.news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/teen-challenged-bachmann-constitution-showdown-running-class-president-125659149.html

““Your slogan for president should be that you’re not a witch,” Myers’ male detractors said, referencing the much-mocked campaign stance of ex-Delaware Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell, who decided to confront her years-old statements about Wicca head-on in her first TV ad. The boys told Myers she just wanted to be “another girl politician” like O’Donnell and former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, whom the boys (and pretty much every late-night comedian) often made fun of”

““The big joke in school is: Want to hear a funny joke? Haha, women’s rights,” says Myers. “Also the boys will tell you, ‘Oh go make me a sandwich,’ when you leave the table. That’s what they’re all like—it’s awful!”

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20064789-503544.html (typical classy teabagger behavior)

See, and I would have figured that if her followers were changing John Wayne’s Wikipedia page, they’d go past the birthplace and take out the fact that he told Playboy magazine in 1971:

I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from [Native Americans] if that’s what you’re asking. Our so called stealing of this country was just a question of survival. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves…. Look, I’m sure there have been inequalities. If those inequalities are presently affecting any of the Indians now alive, they have a right to a court hearing. But what happened 100 years ago in our country can’t be blamed on us today.

...

I believe in white supremacy until blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don’t believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people.

...

Now, I’m not condoning slavery. It’s just a fact of life, like the kid who gets infantile paralysis and has to wear braces so he can’t play football with the rest of us. I will say this, though: I think any black who can compete with a white today can get a better break than a white man. I wish they’d tell me where in the world they have it better than right here in America.

Or maybe they’d edit out the draft-dodging, or the three wives.

But I guess they’re cool with all that. Be nice if someone asked Michele Bachmann about all of it, though.

@2:

In Orwell’s 1984, the evil government forced thousands to rewrite history that had become inconvenient for politicians and high-ranking Party members.

No, you’re misremembering. No orders or instructions to rewrite history were ever issued - the employees of MiniTrue had completely internalised the requirements of their jobs, and mostly didn’t actually believe they were rewriting history, even as they were doing it. They were just correcting obvious errors which had unaccountably slipped into the records.

Abraham Lincoln, first American President from the Republican Party, fought for State’s Rights during the Civil War, alongside Robert E. Lee and Nathan Bedford Forrest.

The Great Depression was caused by Franklin Delano Rosenberg Rosenvelt, who decided to raise taxes on the Productive 1% of Americans while also increasing government spending on the moochers and leeches.  This continued until Herbert Hoover, working with a young Ronald Reagan, finally conquered the liberals and got the country back on track by cutting taxes.

After the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor (with a little help from the Japanese), Marine Gunnery Sargent Ronald Reagan flew with Jimmy Doolittle and bombed Tokyo.  Later, as a 6-Star general, Reagan lead the D-Day invasion, including personally capturing and torturing Adolf Hitler to get the plans for the Atomic Bomb.  He then flew the famous B-29 Enola Gary to drop the atomic bomb on Japan and win the war.

#bachmannhistory…

Marine Gunnery Sargent Ronald Reagan flew with Jimmy Doolittle and bombed Tokyo.  Later, as a 6-Star general, Reagan lead the D-Day invasion, including personally capturing and torturing Adolf Hitler to get the plans for the Atomic Bomb.  He then flew the famous B-29 Enola Gary to drop the atomic bomb on Japan and win the war.

Years later he would lead the conservative charge (with Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond & the very young Trent Lott & Haley Barbour) to pass President Goldwater’s Civil Rights & Voting Rights Acts, over the heads of the Evil Liberal Democrat Congress.

This is kinda fun ...

#17 Rick, you beat me to it. I was going to question the altering of John Wayne’s page because he is such a hero of your average tea bagger who views himself as macho, rugged, totally independent and disdainful of everyone who isn’t just like him. They did not edit Wayne’s views because they agree with him, but I didn’t think they would edit anything about him because tea baggers put him right behind Reagan on their list of real Americans.

What annoys me about the Wayne - Gacy discussion is that it took the spotlight away from the fact that Bachmann would not back down yesterday from a statement she made about abolishing the minimum wage. That is the kind of extremist, anti-labor world view that should scare the shit out of people. Anyone who has been paying attention has to realize that if corporate creeps can get away with it, they will never pay their workers more than one dollar per hour again. It may be fun to laugh at her stupid gaffes but her real views are far more dangerous than mixing up the birthplace of a movie star and a serial killer.

And feeling good about themselves is a huge part of the right wing mind set. Have you ever been to a mega church? Those folks do not preach about Jesus’ work helping people, the message is always “God loves you and please place your offering in the collection plate.” It’s Christianity lite with silly songs, hand waving and lots of “hooray for Jesus and for us”. That has spilled over into “Hooray for America and hooray for us Real Americans”. It is the embodiment of prejudice when you believe that you (and people like you) are inherently good and all others are inherently evil. But that’s where the GOP is at today and they will continue to rewrite history to conform to their worldview for the rest of their lives.

Of course John Quincy Adams was a Founding Father.  You see, back then, they didn’t have child labor laws, so even children could be Founding Fathers!

(who’s proper name eludes me at the moment)

The Mountain Meadows Massacre.

>blockquote>the employees of MiniTrue had completely internalised the requirements of their jobs, and mostly didn’t actually believe they were rewriting history, even as they were doing it. They were just correcting obvious errors which had unaccountably slipped into the records.</blockquote>
Oh, like the Conservative Bible Project. Except the errors in the Bible that they were writing out hadn’t slipped unaccountably in, they were put purposefully by the conspiracy of liberals and feminists.

Remember Eric Carmen’s “Hungry Eyes” from Dirty Dancing? It helps if you are above 40yo.

Michelle Bachman’s got

“Craaaazy Eyyyyyyes…she has mental problems she can’t disguiiiiise

she’s got Craaaaaazy Eyyyyyes…the creep you out and you waaaant to hiiiiide.”

Though when you think about it, a sure sign of a megalomaniac is the desire to be President of the US, so I guess everyone qualifies.

It’s just that others hide it better. Michelle can’t because she’s got…

“Craaaaaazy Eyyyyyyes.”

I suppose Wallace could have asked “Are you ignorant?”
“Are you an extremist?”
He would have lost his fanbase, but his dad would be proud.
Why is it so important that their Leaders be right all the time? If, say, Barbara Boxer, mixed up Bolivia and Venezuela I might defend Boxer by saying that mistakes happen, but I wouldn’t move around South American countries to make her happy! She wouldn’t expect me to either, which is why I like her.

You are being historically inaccurate to suggest there weren’t founding fathers attempting to abolish slavery. What’s weird is, Bachmann didn’t need to use Quincy. 

While, there were dozens of the various of the founding fathers that were prominent abolitionists (most historians suggest a list of over 50 individuals to be classified as “founding fathers”), but just among Morris’ “Big 7” you had Benjamin Franklin and John Jay as pretty prominent and consistent abolitionists.

Benjamin Franklin was a prominent abolitionist (though he did own slaves earlier in his life). In fact, he served as President of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, the first abolition society in American. Most also consider Thomas Paine a “founding father” (though not one of the big 7), and he was a member of this society as well. Benjamin Franklin attempting to get slavery abolition several times and even devised plans to integrate blacks into American society through things like apprenticeships. Also, one of the many reasons he supported the American revolution was he felt that the British Crown was impeding any efforts to free the slaves.

John Jay tried to abolish slavery twice in his home state of New York. In 1799 he managed to get passed and signed a “gradual abolition” bill, which would slate freedom gradually as children got older and prohibited export / imports and what not.  It was imperfect and I believe he was unhappy with it, but I think it was the best John Jay could get politically at the time and it was much better than the status quo. Prior to that he was president of the New York Manumission Society and participated in several boycotts and protests against slave owners. He would also use his wealth to buy young slaves, and release them when they met adulthood.

The remaining Big 7 Founding Fathers seemed nominally against slavery, but they were either inconsistent in their beliefs (e.g. being a slave owner, but opposing freeing them on various grounds) or they never really pushed very hard for abolition or set it aside for what they considered was were important goals. But, I think, politically if they could have, they would have abolished slavery.

But, back to my point, Bachmann could have used either Ben Franklin or John Jay to argue the founding fathers were anti-slavery. Why did she jump to Quincy? Maybe her campaign team hasn’t figured out how to use google yet.

On a random note about the Adams family, Abigail Adams letter’s collection is some of the most eloquent arguments I’ve read against slavery and in favor of women’s rights. It’s pretty obvious Quincy was more influenced by his mother than by his father.

Amanda, you’re mistaken on one pretty major point:  they are not “volunteer propagandists” - the republicans have PAID STAFF whose job (possibly sole job) is to maintain the media purity of the candidates. gop-ers have known since the fall of the berlin wall that it doesn’t matter that reagan’s defense spending actually maintained the soviet union when the pressure of civil rights would have brought it down sooner; so long as they published enough “reagan won the cold war” and “the USSR bankrupted itself trying to keep up with US defense spending” articles, history would become what they said it was, not what actually happened.

i remember getting into an edit war on wikipedia, regarding the iraqi marketplace that john mccain visited (in body armor and with a serious military escort) and was blown up the day after he said it was safe. the editors on the other side were so well-organized that the fact that they were campaign staffers shown through clearly. i think i won, at least for awhile, but it was not easy.

it’s an issue i really don’t think democrats get, and they seem to bank on the internet as being a pure marketplace of ideas. they don’t get that andrew breitbart has employees whose job is to monitor anthony wiener’s twitter account. and they don’t get that for every obvious wikipedia edit to change john wayne’s birthplace or paul revere’s ride, there are probably 30-50 edits that don’t get noticed.

helen w. h. -

There are many things that routinely get written out of our history (at least as taught in the public schools).  Where is the Ludlow Massacre or the Pullman Strike for instance or why did Britain impose those taxes on the American colonists that they were protesting?  These thing, however, are not specifically written out by the Republicans for political purposes, which was the point of my post.  Prior to Reagan, the Republicans mostly were still part of the reality based community and shared the same general understandings of history as the rest of us.  Reagan began the deliberate falsification of history for political gain that is the signature of the modern Republican Party.

I salute the citizens of West Texas.  Here! Here!

I’m not sure that Bachmann is a flake to begin with. A flake is, if nothing else, consistently inconsistent. Bachmann is consistently wrong and extremely driven. That makes her a Dunning-Kruger of a different color.

@1 and 30 DrDick:
Prior to Reagan, the Republicans mostly were still part of the reality based community and shared the same general understandings of history as the rest of us.  Reagan began the deliberate falsification of history for political gain that is the signature of the modern Republican Party.

I still disagree. I see Republican detachment from reality beginning in the 50s. Things like the New Deal were making Democrats really popular, and the Republicans were facing irrelevance. They responded by moving rightward and playing to privileged white people’s fears. That’s something that Reagan and Nixon are famous for, but it began before them. Look at Yalta - in the 50s, Republicans began claiming that the Yalta Conference was some conspiracy wherein FDR had sold America out to Commies. That claim has about as much grounding in reality as Birtherism.

I used to think it was cool that I could answer conservative arguments with musical numbers, now it’s just depressing. O.k. everybody, all together now “Molasses to rum to slaves…”

I see Republican detachment from reality beginning in the 50s.

That certainly does not match my memories of that era.  You still had socially liberal Republicans, like Rockefeller.  Mainstream Republicans pointed and laughed at the John Birch Society (whose positions are now mainstream in the GOP).  Hell, Eisenhower was to the left of Obama on most issues.

Well yeah, the Republicans didn’t go full wingnut instantly, but it looks to me like the Birchers started gaining ground inside the party at around that time, because they were willing to rewrite history to make the Republican Party relevant again. While non-batshit Republicans like Rockefeller and Goldwater were still central to the GOP, McCarthyism and the Yalta conspiracy seem to me to be pretty much the same kind of detachment from reality that Reagan engaged in.

it looks to me like the Birchers started gaining ground inside the party at around that time

Not at all.  Some of their ideas gained some traction with Goldwater (who really was batshit crazy) in the 1960s, but his defeat pretty much beat them back.  As to McCarthy, while it was clearly a Republican circus, anti-communism was pretty much bi-partisan (look at Kennedy’s and Johnson’s foreign policies).  Nixon (who drafted me and is one of my least favorite presidents) supported policies well to the left of those of Obama.  He supported universal health care for instance and established the EPA.  Ford was at least as liberal as Obama on most issues.  It was people, like Cheney and Rumsfield, who had worked on the Goldwater campaign that laid the institutional ground work with groups like PNAC and far right think tanks like the Cato Institute for the eventual take over of the Republican Party that led to the ascendency of Reagan.

Washington and Jefferson, though slave owners, did think slavery was a bad thing. Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration of Independence blamed the slave trade on the British crown, and Washington actually freed his slaves after his and Martha’s death. (Jefferson was too broke to do the same.)

Come to think of it, even Lincoln didn’t advocate abolition of slavery when he first ran for president. The Republican platform only opposed the spread of slavery to the western territories.

I don’t think you can point to a specific time period and that, ‘THAT’S when the Republicans broke from reality.’  Its been a slow processes, over decades.  I wasn’t around in the 50’s, but I do think some of it started then. Nothing major, just fairly minor nods to the more extreme fringe among the party.  By the 70’s it was a lot stronger.  They were still mostly operating in reality, but there were definitely rather major concessions going on to the extremists in the party.  Regan definitely pushed them significantly towards fantasy land, but I would say that they were still operating mostly in the real world at that point.

The big shift really came in the 90’s with Rush Limbaugh, I think.  He took the crazy extremist fringe and made it mainstream. But I think the defining moment that’s completely broken the party’s connection to reality is Fox News. Previously, it was fairly difficult to be completely isolated from reality, but now there’s a good 25-30% of the country or so who live their lives completely cut off from any sort of connection to what’s really going on. They eat, drink and breath propaganda 24/7.  They are, for all intents and purposes, functionally insane with regards to making political decisions because they have absolutely no contact with actual news.

Washington and Jefferson, though slave owners, did think slavery was a bad thing.

Sort of like Augustine’s plea “Lord, make me chaste, but not yet.”

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, my hometown newspaper, just published an opinion piece written by the editorial board about the current state of affairs within the GOP today that impressed Lawrence O’Donnell so much that he recited it in full earlier tonight on his show. It’s quite relevant to the frightening popularity of anti-intellectualism within the current Republican Party. Here’s the best part:

Consider the mythology that makes up GOP orthodoxy today. Imagine the contortions that cramp the brains and souls of men and women of intelligence and compassion who seek state and national office under the Republican banner.

• They must believe, despite the evidence of the 2008 financial collapse, that unregulated — or at most, lightly regulated — financial markets are good for America and the world.

• They must believe in the brilliantly cast conceit known as the “pro-growth agenda,” in which economic growth can be attained only by reducing corporate and individual tax rates, especially among the investor class, and by freeing business from environmental rules that have cleaned up America’s air and water and labor regulations that helped create America’s middle class.

• Though rising health care costs are pillaging the economy, and even though health care in America is now a matter of what you can afford, Republican candidates for office must deny that health care is a basic right and resist a real attempt to change and improve the system.

• GOP candidates must scoff at scientific consensus about global warming. Blame it on human activity? Bad. Cite Noah’s Ark as evidence? Good. They must express at least some doubt about the science of evolution.

• They must insist, statistics and evidence to the contrary, that most of the nation’s energy needs can be met safely with more domestic oil drilling, “clean-coal” technology and greater reliance on perfectly safe nuclear power plants.

• They must believe that all 11.2 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States can be rounded up, detained, tried, repatriated and kept from returning at a reasonable cost.

• Even though there are more than four unemployed persons for every available job, GOP candidates should at least hint that unemployment benefits keep people from seeking jobs.

• They must believe that the Founding Fathers wanted to guarantee individuals the absolute right to own high-capacity, rapid-fire weapons that did not exist in the late 18th century.

By no means is this list complete. It almost makes you feel sorry for the people who pretend to believe this stuff. Almost.

You can find the entire scathing article HERE.

What we’re dealing with when confronting the current GOP isn’t just differences of opinion, it’s differences of fact. There are actual reality-based facts, which we have, and there are imaginary nonsensical “facts”, which the GOP has. The imaginary “facts” that the GOP rely on aren’t really facts at all, but don’t expect them to ever acknowledge that fundamental truth. As long as they absolutely refuse to acknowledge reality-based facts, any attempt to actually have rational discourse with them is utterly futile.

You can’t negotiate with fact-challenged people.

She also could have cited Thomas Paine, though he was more influential in terms of political philosophy than actual government. Plus, you know, the conservatives ran him out of the country for his beliefs on organized religion.

Back in the 60’s, in my little corner of California, the Republicans were actually crazier than the party is today. My congressman, James B. Utt, went on record about barefoot Africans training in Cuba for an invasion of the U.S. In Lyndon Johnson’s landslide year, California passed by an overwhelming majority a proposition permitting racial discrimination in real estate sales.

For all that, they weren’t conspicuously god-botherering. Ayn Rand idolatry comported with anti-communism and her atheism wasn’t an issue.

The founders weren’t exactly deists, as we use the word nowadays. Taking them at their word, they believed in a god that influenced events. Washington composed prayers to some sort of god, thought that all alike, Christian, Mussulman, Jew and Hindoo, believed in the same god, notoriously refused to take communion, and didn’t go to church when he had something better to do. Franklin, whom Adams did not regard as a Christian, expected to meet his creator in person after death. Adams belonged to a Unitarian church and seems to have been interested in the biblical revisionism that was in the news. Jefferson was famously heterodox, was attacked as an atheist in his first election campaign, but never professed anything much different from Adams.

Franklin and Jefferson befriended Joseph Priestly, a Unitarian preacher and experimenter, who more or less discovered oxygen and carbon dioxide, and definitely invented soda water, but never accepted the atomic theory, and fled to the U.S. after his church and home and laboratory were torched by a mob incensed by his heresy.

There were Founding Fathers who were opposed to slavery.  Some of those people, as indicated above, still owned slaves.  Slavery itself was not abolished until the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863.  It’s pretty damned clear that NO ONE was “working tirelessly to abolish slavery” at the time of this nation’s founding.  Bachmann is still wrong even if she hadn’t mentioned Quincy Adams.

The lead video clip was chilling because it demonstrated that Bachman has become skilled at the politician interview trick of repeating one’s messages without answering the questions asked.  That skill is practiced by politicians of all stripes.  The trick is to have ready one’s messages on a wide variety of things you might be asked about.  For instance, a question of minimum wage implicates topics of unemployment and government programs (sort of, at least government mandates to business), so dodge the question by spouting your mantra on cutting back on government programs to boost employment. When pressed by Stephansanslkgnls on it she just fell back on examining “all government programs.”  Since the answer is roughly on topic, people think the pol has answered the question well enough.  In broadcast media the tactic works really well, since the interrogator has limited air time and can’t spend too much time trying to pin down jello. 

The Quincy gaffe defense was a little bizarre. It demonstrated a little knowledge with Quincy’s work experience with his father at a young age, which means she may actually have read something like McCullough’s biography of John Adams.  But maybe she just watched the HBO series with Paul Giamatti and the Amistad movie to pick up Quincy’s anti-slavery work.  She could have admitted stretching a little by including Quincy as a “founding father” but he was 20 when the convention passed the Constitution in 1787 and while not a factor there, he obviously was important in the early years of the republic.  Maybe somebody someday will get her to answer what she means by “founding father”.

Ted H @27

“You are being historically inaccurate to suggest there weren’t founding fathers attempting to abolish slavery.”

Nobody suggested that.  In fact, several of us said the opposite.

Slavery itself was not abolished until the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863.

Actually not.  The Emancipation Proclamation only freed the slaves in the secessionist states.  Slavery was only abolished by the 13th Amendment in 1865.

The lead video clip was chilling because it demonstrated that Bachman has become skilled at the politician interview trick of repeating one’s messages without answering the questions asked. 

In other countries news interviewers have been known to point this out and repeat the question again and again, while the politician looks like a bigger and bigger fool as they refuse to answer.  But heaven forbid American journalists could be so *rude*...

rewrite/obliterate history?  look at the Japanese internment camps in WWII. 

‘nuff said