Liberal humorist Daniel Kurtzman considers the following 10 quotes by Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann to be “stupid.” Let’s see how stupid they really are.
1. “I find it interesting that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out under another, then under another Democrat president, Jimmy Carter. I’m not blaming this on President Obama, I just think it’s an interesting coincidence.” -Rep. Michele Bachmann, on the 1976 Swine Flu outbreak that happened when Gerald Ford, a Republican, was president, April 28, 2009
Dr. Hurd:
Stupid, but not for the reason liberals think. Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama would not be smart enough to pull something like this off; and they would risk killing liberals and Democrats. Jimmy Carter wouldn’t kill his enemies; Barack Obama would, but would let others accept the blame while acting benevolent.
2. “There are hundreds and hundreds of scientists, many of them holding Nobel Prizes, who believe in intelligent design.” -Rep. Michele Bachmann, Oct. 2006
Dr. Hurd: Stupid. Is something true just because someone holding a Nobel Prize believes it? If so, then socialist redistribution of wealth — the favorite economic system of most Nobel Prize winners — would have transformed the world into a wealthy, work-free utopia by now.
3. “Carbon dioxide is portrayed as harmful. But there isn’t even one study that can be produced that shows that carbon dioxide is a harmful gas.” -Rep. Michelle Bachmann, April, 2009
Dr. Hurd: What she probably meant to say was that there’s no scientific proof of global warming. This is true. According to research, if there’s any global change in temperature going on, it’s a cooling trend. However, you need tens of thousands of years to establish any such assertion of global warming/cooling, not mere decades as the global warming religionists are claiming. Mankind cannot predict the weather five days from now with much accuracy; how on earth can we predict the temperature decades if not centuries into the future? Nothing Michele Bachmann ever says will come close to being as stupid as what Al Gore and others claim.
4. “Well what I want them to know is just like, John Wayne was from Waterloo, Iowa. That’s the kind of spirit that I have, too” -Rep. Michele Bachmann, getting her John Waynes mixed up during an interview after launching her presidential campaign in Waterloo, Iowa, where she grew up. The beloved movie star John Wayne was born in Winterset, Iowa, three hours away. The John Wayne that Waterloo was home to is John Wayne Gacy, a notorious serial killer. (June 2011)
Dr. Hurd: Stupid, but unimportant. Obama’s claim that spreading the wealth is (1) moral and (2) generates new wealth is far more stupid than this insignificant misstatement of fact.
5. “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?” -Rep. Michelle Bachmann, calling for a new McCarthyism, Oct. 2008
Dr. Hurd: Proposing to vote out of office people who don’t believe in the American system of government — as originally conceived by the Constitution — is bad? Since when?
6. “Take this into consideration. If we look at American history, between 1942 and 1947, the data that was collected by the Census Bureau was handed over to the FBI and other organizations at the request of President Roosevelt, and that’s how the Japanese were rounded up and put into the internment camps. I’m not saying that that’s what the Administration is planning to do, but I am saying that private personal information that was given to the Census Bureau in the 1940s was used against Americans to round them up, in a violation of their constitutional rights, and put the Japanese in internment camps.” -Rep. Michele Bachmann, June 2009
Dr. Hurd: She’s absolutely right that once government legislates itself the power to do something evil, it will eventually do so. You cannot say, “It won’t happen in America.” It already did. Case in point: The internment of Japanese by Franklin D. Roosevelt in World War II. Roosevelt was essentially a democratically elected dictator, and he was acting as such when he imprisoned Japanese. Fast forward to the present. Obama has used the FCC to establish government authority over the management of the Internet. Left unimpeded, do you think he will resist the urge to impose the newest version of the “Fairness Doctrine” on the Internet? The Constitution was established to limit and check government power. Modern-day liberalism exists to expand government power without objective checks or limits — government power to do what liberals and socialists approve of, that is. Probably the only reason we’re not in a dictatorship now is that every time the electorate swings liberal one year, it swings in the opposite direction two years later. Wait until the next economic crisis hits. Liberals will use that as justification to do things most of us would never dream of happening in America today.
7. “If we took away the minimum wage — if conceivably it was gone — we could potentially virtually wipe out unemployment completely because we would be able to offer jobs at whatever level.” Michele Bachmann, Jan. 2005
Dr. Hurd: This isn’t stupid; it’s factually true. The minimum wage outlaws jobs that aren’t worth a certain price. If a job is worth $15 an hour to an employer, and the government refuses to allow that employer to pay less than $20 an hour, then the job will never come into existence. The employer will simply do it himself, or let the work not get done. Socialist liberals claim they’re doing workers favors by forcing employers to pay them more. In reality, they’re simply making unemployment — especially among the poorest working classes — higher than it would be without a minimum wage law. Liberals know this, but they don’t care. They simply expand government welfare so fewer people can be working and more people can live off the ever-expanding dole. It keeps people dependent on them, and keeps them in power.
8. “During the last 100 days we have seen an orgy. It would make any local smorgasbord embarrassed ‘ The government spent its wad by April 26.” -Rep. Michele Bachmann, accusing the Obama administration of premature fiscal ejaculation, May 2009
Dr. Hurd: I don’t even see where the claimed stupidity is in this quote. This is all literally true; not metaphorically, but literally. The government literally squanders wealth — the productive energy of working individuals — down the toilet of the welfare-regulatory state. “Orgy” is too polite a term for what passes as “government” in early twenty-first century America. The founders would not recognize what became of the USA; however, some of them might not have been surprised. Saddened, but not surprised. I can hear Ben Franklin now: “They turned the monarchy of the King into the monarchy of the masses. They elected a paper King. (That’s Obama.)”
9. “That’s why people need to continue to go to the town halls, continue to melt the phone lines of their liberal members of Congress, and let them know, under no certain circumstances will I give the government control over my body and my health care decisions.” -Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN)
Dr. Hurd: Eloquently put. But she sadly contradicts herself when she comes out against legal, consensual relationships among homosexual adults. And she contradicts herself when she denies the right of a woman to terminate even an early-term pregnancy — the sacrifice of an actual life for a potential life. Now THIS contradiction is stupid. Liberals agree with me on this, but they will never correct their own contradiction — i.e., to get the government the HELL OUT of medical care completely.
10. “Does that mean that someone’s 13-year-old daughter could walk into a sex clinic, have a pregnancy test done, be taken away to the local Planned Parenthood abortion clinic, have their abortion, be back and go home on the school bus? That night, mom and dad are never the wiser.” -Rep. Michele Bachmann, on health care reform’s potential to dupe parents, October 2009
Dr. Hurd: Pretty stupid, I agree. But Tea Party conservatives are no different from conventional Reagan conservatives, in this respect. They lose their reason when it comes to sex and religion. In a country that is becoming less religious and less anti-sexual all the time, this could be her undoing in the general election, should she be the Republican nominee. And then we’re faced with four more years of Obama.
At that point, Michele Bachman might not seem so stupid after all.