Michele Bachmann: Revisionist Historian

The right's most famous wide-eyed loon is at it again.

This weekend marked a big event in Iowa that was a veritable parade of GOP presidential hopefuls.  They were all there to woo the conservatives activists that will decide the nation's first primary.  Of course, Tea Party favorite Michele Bachmann had to show up to lay some of her usual crazy on the audience.

One thing that she said struck me as so foolishly ignorant that I needed to mention it.  Bachmann claimed that, "The preservation of our nation is too important to entrust it to mere politicians.  The founders recognized that it could only be entrusted to the brain trust, and that's the people of this nation."  Yet again, Bachmann is showing that all of her grandstanding aside, she has no understanding whatsoever of the founding of our country.

The men who wrote the Constitution did not entrust the maintenance of our freedom to the people.  One wonders if Bachmann has ever heard of the Electoral College.  In case she hasn't, let me explain.  The Founders hated the idea that the common man would be in charge of the political process.  They thought that most people were simple, uneducated rubes who basically needed to be governed by their betters, for their own good.  One of the ways they ensured that was to create the Electoral College.  As everyone who has taken a 4th grade history classes knows, the Constitution created a body of "politicians" that would select the president based up on the popular election results from the people.  This is just one example of how the Founders placed barriers in the way of direct rule by the "brain trust" that Bachmann referenced.

Want more examples?  How about the fact that only white, property owning men over a certain age were allowed to vote.  Does that sound like the policy of a group that wanted "the people" to be guarantors of the nation?  How about the fact that Senators were chosen not by the people, but by the politicians in state legislatures.  Anyone who knows American history knows these things and knows that the Founding Fathers did not want the people to have unconstrained control over the country.

ASIDE:

On a mostly unrelated note, Bachmann also drew huge applause with a little quip that she had, "...introduced the light bulb freedom of choice act!"  I can't understand the fixation of the movement right on these types of issues.  They apparently don't consider it a violation of our rights and freedoms for the government to impose warrantless wiretaps, rendition, etc.  But they consider it a huge infringement if they can't buy incandescent light bulbs?  Of course, the real issue isn't that they hate CFLs.  The real issue is that they know that phasing out incandescents (a policy introduced by the Bush administration, by the way) is about reducing energy usage and dealing with climate change.  The Tea Party crowd firmly believes that climate change is a hoax and that any action taken to correct it, even if it imposes no burden on them, is a priori a bad idea and an infringement upon their liberties.