The mainstream media and too many Americans seem to be accepting the lie that Michele Bachmann was “just kidding” when she described Hurricane Irene and the recent earthquake as a “message from God” to, of course, impose her religiously-motivated beliefs about society on the rest of us.
I invite folks to watch her actual comments and come to your own conclusions about whether or not she was “kidding”. I think she’s dead serious. I think this garbage is completely consistent with her political history, and she is currently a leading contender for the GOP nomination.
Whether she admits it or not, she is striving to be America’s Ayatollah, imposing her bizarre fundamentalist Protestant religious beliefs on us and, by implication, the rest of the world. This epitomizes why some of us are extremely concerned about the influence of right-wing fundamentalist Christianity on politics and government.
The media was not shy about branding the Ayatollah Khomeini a religious tyrant. The media was not shy about making the far more restrained political statements of Jeremiah Wright a major issue during Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.
Why is the media so reluctant to similarly brand Michele Bachmann as the religious fanatic she is?
By the way, am I the only one to notice the hilarious irony between her reference to America’s “morbid obesity diet” (whatever THAT means) — around 0:22 in the clip — and the morbidly obese audience members in the frame behind her as she offers her rant? Was this intentional?
…especially since it fits what we already know about her from previous comments. This is not the first time the I-was-joking defense has been used. Ann Coulter, for example, has been known to say some pretty outrageous things and when called on it say something like, “Liberals have no sense of humor.”
As for your last question I doubt it was intentional, or that Bachmann thinks before she speaks much of the time. She is a talking point machine and I have lost count of the number of times I have seen a journalist ask her a very specific question only for her to rehash a more general point that is at best tangentially related.
“Of course, she was joking,” I thought, but, seeing the video, it’s hard to continue to think with that.
What I find most disturbing about Ms. Bachmann is her extreme carelessness with facts. I’d more readily think that this was yet another of her careless moments than that I believe she was being comedic in the middle of such a dour, over-emphatic address.
It sounds to me more like she doesn’t believe it, but she’s saying what she thinks the audience will respond to. Or maybe that’s just the way she delivers speech applause lines, and she does believe it.
But I also think she’s openly and sincerely standing in solidarity with normal people who believe that God is just, and that natural disasters and wars and pestilence are signs from God that we need to care more about the future and do the simple things right, and love each other and the planet, and stop people trying to overcome and replace God with programs and science and lazy impudent smartypants stuff. She’s standing in solidarity with that, but I think the dissonance I detect is that she knows there is such a thing as plate tectonics and hurricanes and that these are natural phenomena that happen randomly, or rather completely deterministically, but unpredictably, and unrelated to anything else. I think she knows hurricanes and earthquakes are only signs from God to the extent that we like to think they are, and that it is OK to think so. That’s why it can both be a joke and totally sincere at the same time, because it’s OK to be religious and tremble about God. It’s not illegal to believe in God, is it?
So you join the chorus of wackos thinking that Sharia law is creeping into America and we have to be on guard against it. Sorry but saying that God is responsible for things, and shuddering for the nation when considering that God is just and might punish us, are perfectly legal and perfectly understandable ways to understand moral responsibility to do the right thing.
I know you didn’t say anything about sharia law but you did refer to her as America’s Ayatollah. It isn’t Sharia law when the law is written by legislative branch and executed by the executive branch and judged by the judicial branch. Sharia law is when the religious leaders are directly in charge of the state, and all the laws of the state come from the Koran and are interpreted by Imans and Ayatollahs. That is not going to happen here, and to say so is crazy, it’s crap, and you should not engage in such xenophobic fear mongering.
I didn’t write about “Sharia law”. The fact that religious cults exist that are even more extreme than the anti-Catholic fanatics that Michele Bachmann chose to worship with for a decade is a distraction.
I wrote about Michele Bachmann, and her fanatic pursuit of her own vision of what her god has planned for the rest of us.
Listen to the following (no audio) fervent prayer in support of Bradlee Dean’s openly homophobic “ministry”:
Michele Bachmann’s “calling” should be more frightening to any American than the bogey-man of “Sharia law” that you attempt to distract us with.
Her prayer is embedded in http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2011/05/michele_bachmann_prays_for_bradley_deans_homophobic_ministry.php.
Sadly, it’s an iframe that apparently doesn’t pass the BMG tag filters.
Just not in the visual editor tab.
Perhaps you should change the title so as not to attack her using xenophobia and the irrational fear of Islam and the crap idea of the threat of sharia law. How about something more like “Bachmann Believes God Punishing US” or something like that. Laws against abortion or gay marriage or even local blue laws and moments of silence are not Sharia, President’s are not Ayatollahs, and it’s crap to conflate the two. American law is made democratically, and is secular, and
…is that there are those who seek to impose Christian Theocracy in much the same way as Islamic Theocracies impose Sharia Law. Iran, for example, has separate government branches at least by constitution and DO have elections in which multiple candidates are allowed, but the laws in practice have a Sharia bent to them. We must be vigilant if we do not want that happening here, albeit on a Christian rather than Muslim basis.
This is, in fact, exactly my point.
If he’d said something more like that, at least it wouldn’t be pandering to Islamophobia and ignorance. But it’s still “crap” and “crazy” to talk about people who would “impose Christian Theocracy” just as much as it is to fear people imposing Sharia law. He should change the title of his post, Bachmann is not going to impose Sharia law or a Christian Theocracy.
Hitler was (sort of) democratically elected.
The “Handmaid’s Tale” lays out rather succinctly how easily — and quickly — a democratically-elected government can be replaced by religious tyranny when given an opportunity.
If America is an exceptional nation and this exceptionalism is a result of God then Michelle and others are left to explain why bad things happen to good people like us. So an earthquake must be a message. Just the same as how Falwell said 9/11 happened because of abortion.
http://www.snopes.com/rumors/falwell.asp
drop out of the race and stop embarrassing yourself and our party. Go back to being a Congresswoman full time and help us elect a Republican to the Oval office… just not you.