Saturday Night Live mocked Michelle Bachmann’s response to the State of the Union in the video above.
Of course the funniest (or most tragic) aspect of all of this is not that Bachmann failed to look into the network’s camera but that people take the argument she is repeating seriously. The right wing has been rewriting history in blaming the Republican-created deficit on Obama. To do so they start with spending upon Obama taking office even though he was in the final fiscal year of the last Bush budget. After Obama took office he began to include the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the budget while Bush kept the wars off the budget, giving a false appearance of a jump in spending. This argument also ignores the fact that the Bush tax cuts for the top two percent account for a large part of the deficit–far more than the stimulus spending Obama used to keep the country out of a depression.
RT @RonChusid: SNL Mocks Bachmann Reply & The GOP Fictions in Blaming Obama For The Deficit #p2 #p21 #topprog http://bit.ly/fME5fW
The University that awarded Congresswoman Bachmann a law degree should be ashamed (Please don’t tell me it was Oral Roberts University). If the founding fathers (I suppose she included the Southern founding fathers who owned slaves) worked tirelessly to abolish slavery how come the country fought a civil war over slavery? Did the law school that granted Bachmann a law degree fail to teach, or even mention, the 1857 Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision? If everyone who came to America was welcomed as equal, regardless of race, then why was it necessary to pass three Constitutional Amendments: the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth? Did Rep. Bachmann learn any thing about the Jim Crow period that ushered in legal segregation of the races in the Southern States? Is it possible that the college and the law school she attended omitted any mention of the Supreme Court’s “Plessy v. Ferguson” decision? I have a sneaking suspicion that, Rep. Bachmann, a college educated and a lawyer, is not that ignorant. Rather, she seems determined to re-write history to conform with teabaggers’ claims that their mission is to restore the ideals of the pure and blameless founding fathers.
Who is dumber?; Michelle for saying the Founding Fathers eliminated slavery, or Sarah for saying that the Soviet Union collapsed because of Sputnik. What do you think?