So, Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., did what she does best yesterday. What Michele does best, of course, is say something completely insane, with absolute conviction. To wit:
The full transcript is available here, but here are the most relevant sections:
CHRIS MATTHEWS: If you have liberal views, does that mean you have anti-American views? What’s the connection? I don’t get the connection. What’s the connection between liberal and leftist and anti-American? If you’re liberal, are you anti-American?
REPUBLICAN REPRESENTATIVE MICHELE BACHMANN (MN-06): Well, the liberals that are Jeremiah Wright and that are Bill Ayers, they’re over the top anti-American, and that’s the question that Americans have. Remember it was Michelle Obama who said she’s only recently proud of her country. And so these are very anti-American views.
[…]
MATTHEWS: So you think Barack Obama may have anti-American views?
BACHMANN: Absolutely. I’m very concerned that he may have anti-American views.
[…]
MATTHEWS: How many Congresspeople, members of Congress, are in that anti-American crowd you describe? How many Congresspeople that you serve with?
BACHMANN: Right now —
MATTHEWS: How many are anti-American in the Congress right now that you serve with?
BACHMANN: You’d have to ask them, Chris. I’m focusing on Barack Obama and the people that he’s been associated with and I’m very worried about their anti-American nature.
MATTHEWS: But do you suspect there are a lot of people you serve with — well, he’s the United States senator from Illinois, he’s one of the people you suspect as being anti-American. How many people in Congress of the United States do you believe are ant-American? Is he alone or are there others? How many do you suspect of your colleagues of being anti-American.
BACHMANN: What I would say what I would say is that the news media should do a penetrating exposé and take a look. I wish they would. 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? I think people would be — would love to see an expose like that.
But that’s dodging the question, Michele! If the newsmedia is going to determine who is pro- and who is anti-American, they’re gonna need a good working definition. So it’s time to name names. Who do you think is anti-American, Rep. Bachmann? Certainly, the gentleman from Minnesota’s Fifth. And the gentleman from Indiana’s Seventh, too. I mean, those are just gimmes. But who else? Is Nancy Pelosi anti-American? Probably. Harry Reid? Of course. Barack Hussein Super-Allah Obama? Duh. But does it stop there? Or is Colin Peterson anti-American too? Is it really just a matter of noting the “D” before a legislator’s state? Or are there pro-American Democrats — you know, other than Joe Lieberman? And — dare I wonder — are there vipers in the nest of the GOP? Is Chuck Hagel anti-American? Jim Ramstad? Norm Coleman?
We need to know, Michele, and right quick. You need to spearhead this, take up the cause, get HUAC reconstituted. You need to be out front on this, Michele. America needs you to save it from the dread specter of evil, duly-elected members of Congress.
And don’t be dissuaded by the fact that your DFL challenger, former MnDOT Commissioner El Tinklenberg, has thus far raised over $50,000 since you went on Hardball — and people are still going to the ActBlue site and donating. Don’t worry that there’s already a “Censure Michele Bachmann” site set up. After all, nothing is more un-American than opposing a candidate like you for political office, right?
No, Rep. Bachmann, this is the fight you were born to lead. I urge you to embrace it wholeheartedly. Don’t back down. Don’t give an inch. Tell El Tinklenberg to his face that he’s un-American. Tell every DFLer in Minnesota that we’re un-American. Own it, Michele. Because if we’re really anti-American, that’s your duty. And if we’re not — and we’re not — it will destroy your political career. If it hasn’t already.
Geez, what’s the criteria for being anti-American ? Would not paying your property taxes on time or not filing your Congressional Personal Disclosure form on time be flaunting your civic duties ? I suppose that the media will be so busy talking to all the other members of Congress that they will not have time to find out if Congresswoman Bachmann paid her $200 fine for late filing of her Disclosure form.
Am I the only one who got a creepy Palmer Raids type of vibe from this?
I would not say that Sen. Obama is anti-American. I would say that he is grossly mistaken about what governmental policies will strenghten America. I would also say that he does a very poor job in selecting advisors and associates, and that some of them do seem anti-American.
Good! I wouldn’t say that about Senator McCain, either.
I would say that about Senator McCain, and would note that when it comes to matters of economics, most economists agree with me, and when it comes to negotiating with hostile nations, most past secretaries of state agree with me.
Would you say that the same is true of John McCain, who pals around with convicted felon, saboteur, public advocate of murder, and attempted election-thief, G. Gordon Liddy, or is it ‘different’ when it’s your guy?
—Myca
RonF,
Out of curiosity, do you think Obama is a socialist or that he advocates socialist policies? If so, what do you consider to be the meaning of “socialist”?
Since you seem to know who is “anti-American” and who isn’t then why don’t you fucking enlighten us!
Ron, by “associates,” I assume you mean Ayers. But what “advisors” (plural) of Obama’s do you consider anti-American?
In addition to G. Gordon Liddy, I’d ask Myca’s question about double-standards regarding McCain’s association with The US Council For World Freedom.
Even worse, McCain recently appointed William Timmons, a lobbyist who worked on Saddam Hussain’s behalf to be in charge of McCain’s presidential transition team.
My great-great-grandfather was on the Titanic’s New York welcoming committee.
Heh.
To make it clear, I haven’t changed my view that guilt-by-association is, except in the most extreme cases, a stupid way of distinguishing between candidates when there are clear policy differences between the candidates.
But if you ARE going to use that standard — and there’s no reason you should — then Obama looks, if anything, better than McCain. Those who use this standard only against Obama are using a double-standard.
IMO, the “guilt by association” tactic used by McCain supporters is more rationalization than serious argument.
In fairness to the saner McCain supporters, they are not using guilt-by-association. Guilt-by-association says that if X is Y (where Y is communist, ex-terrorist, convicted felon), and if Z associates with X, then Z also is Y.
Obviously, this is logically fallacious.
However, there is a related but less logically stupid way to make use of X’s being a Y: point out that Y is such a heinous thing to be that for Z to associate with X, Z must be saying that Y isn’t “beyond the pale.” With regard to Ayers, a further subtlety that is necessary, because many respectable Republican citizens also have associated with him, is that while associated with X doesn’t mean Z is a bad person, it does indicate a fault in judgment. This fault in judgment is tolerable in a former Ambassador or a university president, but is intolerable for the president of the U.S.
In my opinion, the only aspect of Obama’s interactions with Ayers that throws his judgment into question is his having visited Ayers’s home in order to further his own political career. Everything else he did with Ayers was to achieve praiseworthy goals: school reform and alleviation of poverty. In contrast, what good have North and Liddy attempted to achieve since they were household names? For what purpose other than showing his bona fides with the base does McCain associate with them?
PG, I find the word “socialist” gets thrown around quite a lot. There are political parties that self-identify as such, there are politicial parties that are described by others as such, it’s used as an epithet, and it’s also used outside of a formal political sense to (as far as I can see) describe policies that tend to increase a government’s power vs. those of individuals in conjunction with a tendency to use that power to take money from unwilling people and give it to people (or use it to buy services for people) that have less. Now, if you want to argue about that, fine. But I don’t represent that as a formal or commonly accepted definition of the term and have no intention of defending it as such, so go argue with someone else.
So, no – I’m not going to describe Sen. Obama’s policies as socialist. But that’s not because I’m claiming that they are (or are not). It’s because I’m not comfortable using a term I cannot define.
I don’t know that the answer he gave Joe the Plumber (who is definitely getting his 15 minutes of fame a little harder and faster than he’d like, I bet) about spreading the wealth is socialist. I do think it’s disturbing. It’s not the business of government to redistribute income. It’s the business of government to defend our right to go out and get our own wealth based on our own abilities and our own will to use those abilities.
Now, on a practical basis it’s best for the country as a whole to help people to do the latter. So, for example, it makes sense to support the idea of publicly funded education. While is is funded via tax money (in and of itself a bad thing) the overall benefit is to ensure that the citizenry is better able to both inform itself and to earn a legal, productive living. Sixteen years of school is an inventment that pays off over avoiding a generation’s worth of welfare or jail, which is good from a moral sense as well as a financial sense.
Amp, let me make my position clear on this: I don’t think that if X is a terrorist and Y associates with X, then Y is a terrorist. That’s guilt by association, and it’s bogus. I think, though, that if Y is a candidate for executive office then you have to wonder what kind of people are going to be influential with Y when Y starts selecting both policies and the staff to carry them out.
As far as anti-American goes, Sen. Obama’s previous pastor of, what, 20 years seems to fill the bill. Note that I’m not saying that on just the basis of one noteworthy sound bite from one sermon. The man has quite a body of work over a long time. Lots of it was on his church’s web site, which I had perused about a year before it hit the national media. Unfortunately, the web site was scrubbed after that happened. Suffice it to say that his philosophy of “God damn America” was not limited to that one time that we’ve all heard on the news. But it was more important to Sen. Obama to rub shoulders with that community’s social and political leaders and have his children sit and listen to him than it was to repudiate that philosophy.
I do find those links disturbing, although there’s a lot of misinformation being passed around and I’d want to check it out. I’ll freely grant that G. Gordon Liddy is a real asshole and I don’t like Sen. McCain’s association with him. OTOH, the level of association between the two is nowhere near the level of association between Sen. Obama and Ayers, Rezko and the rest.
Now, one group that I will stretch farther towards “guilt by association” is the overall link between Daley’s Chicago Democratic Party and Sen. Obama. Illinois politics in general and the Daley administration and Democratic Party (the two are not particularly separable) are incredibly corrupt. Sen. Obama apparently thinks that he can lie down with pigs and not get dirty. There’s a few words one can use to describe this, the most polite one of which that comes to mind is “fiction”. Do I think that Sen. Obama has taken money? No. But then neither has Mayor Daley. In order to associate with that crowd Sen. Obama has had to work with and support one of the worst groups of politicians in America and endorse them over people who are truly working for reform. I cannot countenance compromising with that group enough to get their political support. I find it actually frightening that the Chicago political establishment will have someone in the White House who owes them favors (such as, say, finding a new U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois).
Myca;
and when it comes to negotiating with hostile nations, most past secretaries of state agree with me.
I’m not clear on that. I agree that we should engage states such as North Korea, Iran, etc. diplomatically. From what I’ve read the difference between Sens. Obama and McCain is that the former has said that he would meet with the President of Iran without preconditions, whereas the latter believes that prior negotiations and conditions need to be determined at lower levels before the heads of state meet. I believe that when this detail is considered most previous Secretaries of State are more in line with Sen. McCain.
This has come up before. Sen. Kennedy made an eagerness to meet with Premier Khrushchev part of his electoral platform. While his Secretary of State held that lower level officials should first establish an agenda of common ground (i.e., preconditions) he plunged ahead. It turned out to be disastrous, as Khrushchev took that and Kennedy’s performance at the meetings as weakness. It is judged to have been contributory to subsequent Soviet actions such as the Berlin Wall and importation of missles into Cuba.
RonF,
Consult a dictionary. You’ll find that pretty much every definition of socialism has nothing about taxation but a great deal about what the Bush Administration is doing right now, putting government in ownership of a major industry (the financial sector). The fact that people use a word imprecisely in order to benefit themselves is not a good reason to give up on precision in language.
You also seem to be missing Joe the Plumber’s beliefs about what is acceptable tax policy. He agrees with you that we have to pay taxes. However, he thinks it is “punishing success” for people with more money to have to pay more in taxes. This isn’t just an opposition to the progressive income tax (the only system of federal income tax we’ve ever had, starting with the first such tax which was imposed only on incomes above $100k a year), but even to a flat rate tax, because of course a 10% tax on someone making $10k will take fewer of their dollars than of someone making $100k. Nor is McCain advocating the abolition of the progressive income tax, perhaps because he’s noticed that in past campaigns, the Republican primary candidate advocating flat tax (Forbes, Huckabee) hasn’t been the winner.
Consistent with McCain’s difficulties in hewing to any political principle, he now believes that a top marginal federal income tax rate that is no higher than it was under Clinton is “socialism,” even though he voted against the Bush tax cuts that reduced that rate.
Suffice it to say that his philosophy of “God damn America” was not limited to that one time that we’ve all heard on the news.
Really? I was checking out the website in February of last year when Amber Taylor was writing about it, and I don’t remember having seen anything about “God damn America” then. The lovely thing about the internets today is that we have archive.org and other sites that will store old versions of sites. If you tell me approximately when you were looking at TUCC’s website and saw this “God damn America” type material, I probably can pull it up so you don’t have to base your claim that there was such solely on your recollection.
Senator Obama has made it exceedingly clear that by “without precondition”, he meant that he would forego the Bush administration’s failed tactic of demanding concessions in exchange for condescending to meet with the other government. (As if the negotiation itself is some sort of prize.) He dismisses as ridiculous McCain’s interpretation that he would meet directly with the other head of state without first discussing and setting terms for the meeting at lower levels.
You can be forgiven for your misunderstanding, though, as McCain has continued to misrepresent Obama’s position despite being repeatedly corrected.
An interesting claim, Ron.
What specific associations do you believe Obama and Ayers to have?
What I’m asking here is for a list. Something like:
1) Obama hired William Ayers as an adviser for his presidential campaign
2) Ayers was invited to speak to his classes at the University of Chicago Law School
3) Obama has endorsed Ayers’ actions as a member of the Weather Underground
That kind of thing.
So: what specific associations do you believe Obama and Ayers to have?
—Myca
Pingback: » The Obama-Ayers Connection: A Comprehensive List - Blogger News Network
Bachmann’s blather earned Tinklenberg $50,000? Try $640,000 and counting! Hell, Tinkenberg’s gonna have to list Bachmann on his next campaign finance disclosure form.
As Fecke well knows, that woman is Bat-Shit Crazy. From her hiding in the bushes at gay rights rallies to her claim to know of a secret plan to divvy up Iraq to her over-the-top embrace of the President, she is well beyond the pale. She’s BAT. SHIT. CRAZY. I’ve always said so.
Sure, sometimes people would object when I said this. But it was a telling sign I stopped getting objections from people. It was an even more telling sign when I started getting objections from bats.
And today I starting to get objections from shit.
Keep those cards and dollars flowing, folks. Minnesota’s 6th Congressional District was gerrymandered as a Republican stronghold, but we’re gonna breach those walls at last.
PG:
You also seem to be missing Joe the Plumber’s beliefs about what is acceptable tax policy.
I don’t know how you derive that from my post. I didn’t comment on Joe the Plumber’s beliefs on taxes. I commented on Sen. Obama’s expressed belief that indicates that he thinks it’s a legitimate function of government to use taxes to “spread the wealth around”.
You’re the one who brought up Joe the Plumber and his 15 minutes of fame. I’m pointing out that those 15 minutes have exposed an unusual set of beliefs about economic policy that the McCain campaign should be cautious about endorsing. However, caution being one of those conservative ideas that apparently died with William F. Buckley, the McCain campaign instead has made “Joe the Plumber” and “Don’t tax me for working hard” a literal centerpiece of the campaign website.
Any system of taxation, except a flat fee paid by all who benefit from government services, will spread the wealth around, because wealthy people always can form private associations to give themselves the benefits that a government provides to all citizens regardless of wealth. Wealthy people used to have their own fire fighters; they still have their own security behind gated communities and own education in private schools and their own transportation in private vehicles. If a government is taxing, that means it is redistributing money, albeit in the form of services, to people who couldn’t afford to buy those services on the open market. Even the libertarian night watchman state is giving the benefit of a night watchman to the low-income woman who could not afford security to keep herself from getting raped in the street, and it takes money away from the wealth woman who can afford her own bodyguard to do so.
That’s why I say that if the GOP really wants to run against the redistribution of wealth, bring it on. There are many more voters benefiting from that redistribution than who are burdened by it — and as can be seen by the tendency of people to go Democratic once they’ve got more than a college education and are making over $250k a year, even many of those who carry the burden are OK with it.
Yes, it’s utterly beyond the pale for any preacher to blame the acts of foreign terrorists on innocent American citizens, or claim God has sent a natural disaster to punish Americans, and no respectable politician would ever try to get involved with such preachers to gain votes.
Oh, wait. IOKIARDI! I forgot that for a moment there.
IOKIARDI. Also, scary black people! Also, did you know Obama was associated with a Terrorist? If that’s too many words for you, just ignore all but the boldface ones.
Hee hee!
Bachman now says that she was tricked into appearing on Hardball – a show she’d never heard of before, or so she claims. And the National Republican Congressional Committee is using Bachmann’s lines in fundraising appeals to stir up the faithful about how the bad ol’ Mainstream Media is picking on Republicans.
Yet the self-same NRCC has elected to pull their advertising funds out of Minnesota’s 6th Cong. Dist and leave Bachman flopping on the dock like an unwanted fish.
Meanwhile Tinklenberg’s haul has nearly hit $1.5 milllion. He’s barely begun to spend the money, and already a new poll gives Tinklenberg his first lead! Ok, dutiful killjoys like Fecke will feel compelled to note that it’s still within the margin of error. But longtime political observers are suggesting this might just be the right time to screw Fecke.* I’ve been practicing my 6th District Happy Dance ever since Patty Wetterling days, and I ain’t waiting another goddamn minute. I’m bouncin’ as I type!
DONATE, BABY, DONATE! VOTE, BABY, VOTE!
*”I’m Jeff Fecke, and I endorse this message.” (Ok, he didn’t really, but I wouldn’t be surprised.)