Think Again: This Fish Rots from the Head Down

Crossposted with the Center for American Progress.

Republican Representative Michelle Bachmann issued a call last week for a "house call" and a big party out on the National Mall next week, saying, "we're going to tell Congress what they can do with their health care bill." She went on to say that, "The American people realize this is it. Just like that brand new Michael Jackson movie came out, 'This Is It.' This is it for freedom. If you believe in liberty, and if you're rejecting tyranny, this is it. Dr. Mark Levin wrote a seminal book that really swept this country called Liberty and Tyranny. And that's what this debate is about next week. Liberty and tyranny."

Leave aside that Ms. Bachmann likens her cause to that of a film glorifying an entertainer famous for dangling his children outside hotel windows and who is also repeatedly accused of child molestation. Such confusion on the part of Bachmann is nothing new for a woman who believes Barack Obama represents "really the final leap to socialism."

To be fair, she's not all that detail-oriented. Remember Bachmann's "interesting" (her word) observation "that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat president, Jimmy Carter." Actually, Gerald Ford was president during the last outbreak of the virus, but never mind that. Bachmann has also been known to complain about the disastrous "Hoot-Smalley Tariff," which she says led Franklin Delano Roosevelt to turn the "recession into a depression." Alas, the Smoot-Hawley Act was passed and signed during the administration of Republican President Herbert Hoover. The United States had already been in a depression for over a year.

I re-raise these incidents now because a couple of Sundays ago, George F. Will, America's most distinguished conservative commentator--in light of the death of William Safire--recently wrote a column in which admired Bachmann as a "petite pistol that occasionally goes off half-cocked." And yet he found "admirable" her complaints of a "gangster government" and praises her as "an authentic representative of the Republican base" (at least I think it was praise)...

You can read the rest of Eric Alterman analysis in his recent article, "Think Again: This Fish Rots from the Head Down"

Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College. He is also a Nation columnist and a professor of journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. His seventh book, Why We're Liberals: A Handbook for Restoring America's Most Important Ideals, was recently published in paperback. He occasionally blogs at http://www.thenation.com/blogs/altercation and is a regular contributor to The Daily Beast.

 

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