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Incredible Michele Bachmann Speech Gets Every Historical Fact Wrong

Why does Michele Bachmann like the history of the founding fathers so much? Because, apparently, you can just make it up as you go along! Listen ye children as we do a “close read” of this speech and discover the many amazing improvised historical facts Michele Bachmann made up for us.

Let’s skip past the “the Tom Addison, the Tom Adams, err, John Adamses” part of this speech, and the part when she says immigrants are good, if they were born in the seventeenth century and were white. Cue it up to 9:00 or so.

9:30—Thomas Jefferson would be very interested to find out he plagiarized whole-cloth, without crediting those weirdo pilgrims, some sort of prayer thing from the Mayflower Compact. But it’s her word against his, and he never raised millions of dollars and blanketed the air with teevee ads, so he automatically loses.

9:40—Eighteenth-century America: “It didn’t matter the color of their skin, it didn’t matter their language, it didn’t matter their economic status… it made no difference. Once you got here, we were all the same. Isn’t that remarkable.” Yes, yes it certainly is! Those black slaves and poor white indentured servants were idiots! They didn’t realize they lived in a totally equal society, completely in line with one another. They just thought they were de-jure or de-facto owned by other humans! Whoops! COLONIAL FAIL! (Also: If this sounds like socialism, it WASN’T. Michele says the Pilgrims didn’t come over here for universal health care, so there.)

10:20—”We know there was still slavery that was still tolerated when the nation began.” Oh! So, forget all that other shit she said? “But we also know that the very founders who wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States. And I think it is high time that we recognize the contribution of our forbearers who worked tirelessly, men like John Quincy Adams, who would not rest until slavery was extinguished in the country.” She is really stressing the “tirelessly” here, because isn’t it weird that the Constitution would have nothing about slavery in it? And how so many of its framers wanted slavery and owned slaves themselves? People like, let’s see here, “the George Washingtons and the Thomas Jeffersons” she discussed earlier? They must have gotten pretty tired fighting Michele’s “evil” people who owned slaves (themselves). So tired, in fact, that though they “would not rest” until they finally saw slavery banned, they actually all died many decades before it happened! That just shows how dedicated the founders were. Their ghosts did more than half of century of grunt work on an issue they could have just solved in the Constitution without so much bloodshed.

11:15—”We were a self-correcting country.” Yes, that sure is one way to describe it.

12:30—”Did you ever think in your lifetime that you would see the federal government purchase the largest car companies in the United States.” No. Because most people, those of us who believe in things like “sales figures” and “reported profits” realize GM and Chrysler aren’t the two largest car companies in the United States. There aren’t even the two largest American car companies in the United States. And the government didn’t even really buy these companies: one is a private company, and the other is publicly traded. You know what this means? Toyota and Ford are probably owned by the government too, and all cars are made by welfare queens in Mexican slums built between the local Lowe’s and Home Depot. Also, the country didn’t buy those banks she listed. And Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were set up by the government and were government-sponsored enterprises. But whatever, she’s been right about everything up to this point in her speech, right?

Anyway, your next president! She will be able to rewrite history at any point, whether it’s the most ancient of history of humankind, or something she did five minutes ago.

http://wonkette.com/435940/incredible-michele-bachmann-speech-gets-every-single-historical-fact-wrong
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Here is a transcript of Bachmann's speech:

Good evening. My name is Congresswoman Michele Bachmann from Minnesota's 6th District.

I want to thank the Tea Party Express and Tea Party HD for inviting me to speak this evening. I'm here at their request and not to compete with the official Republican remarks.

The Tea Party is a dynamic force for good in our national conversation, and it's an honor for me to speak with you.

Two years ago, when Barack Obama became our president, unemployment was 7.8%, and our national debt stood at what seemed like a staggering $10.6 trillion. We wondered whether the president would cut spending, reduce the deficit and implement real job-creating policies.

Unfortunately, the president's strategy for recovery was to spend a trillion dollars on a failed stimulus program, fueled by borrowed money. The White House promised us that all the spending would keep unemployment under 8%. Not only did that plan fail to deliver, but within three months, the national jobless rate spiked to 9.4%. It hasn't been lower for 20 straight months. While the government grew, we lost more than 2 million jobs.

Let me show you a chart. Here are unemployment rates over the past 10 years. In October of 2001, our national unemployment rate was at 5.3%. In 2008, it was at 6.6%. But just eight months after President Obama promised lower unemployment, that rate spiked to a staggering 10.1%. Today, unemployment is at 9.4% with about 400,000 new claims every week.

After the $700 billion bailout, the trillion-dollar stimulus, and the massive budget bill with over 9,000 earmarks, many of you implored Washington to please stop spending money that we don't have. But instead of cutting, we saw an unprecedented explosion of government spending and debt. It was unlike anything we've ever seen before in the history of the country.

Well, deficits were unacceptably high under President Bush, but they exploded under President Obama's direction, growing the national debt by an astounding $3.1 trillion.

Well, what did we buy? Instead of a leaner, smarter government, we bought a bureaucracy that now tells us which lightbulbs to buy and which may put 16,500 IRS agents in charge of policing President Obama's health care bill. Obamacare mandates and penalties may even force many job-creators to just stop offering health insurance altogether, unless, of course, yours is one of the more than 222 privileged companies, or unions, that's already received a government waiver under Obamacare.

In the end, unless we fully repeal Obamacare, a nation that currently enjoys the world's finest health care might be forced to rely on government-run coverage. That could have a devastating impact on our national debt for even generations to come.

For two years, President Obama made promises, just like the ones we heard him make this evening, yet still we have high unemployment, devalued housing prices, and the cost of gasoline is skyrocketing.

Well, here's a few suggestions for fixing our economy. The president could stop the EPA from imposing a job-destroying cap-and-trade system. The president could support a balanced budget amendment. The president could agree to an energy policy that increases American energy production and reduces our dependence on foreign oil.

The president could also turn back some of the 132 regulations put in place in the last two years, many of which will cost our economy $100 million or more. And the president should repeal Obamacare and support free-market solutions, like medical malpractice reform and allowing all Americans to buy any health care policy they like anywhere in the United States.

We need to start making things again in this country, and we can do that by reducing the tax and regulatory burden on job-creators. America will have the highest corporate tax rate in the world. Think about that. Look no further to see why jobs are moving overseas.

But thanks to you, there's reason for all of us to have hope that real spending cuts are coming, because last November, you went to the polls, and you voted out the big-spending politicians and you put in their place great men and women with a commitment to follow our Constitution and cut the size of government. I believe that we're in the very early days of a history-making turn in America.

Please know how important your calls, visits and letters are to the maintenance of our liberties. Because of you, Congress is responding, and we're just beginning to start to undo the damage that's been done the last few years, because we believe in lower taxes, we believe in a limited view of government and exceptionalism in America. And I believe that America is the indispensable nation of the world.

Just the creation of this nation itself was a miracle. Who can say that we won't see a miracle again? The perilous battle that was fought during World War II in the Pacific at Iwo Jima was a battle against all odds, and yet this picture immortalizes the victory of young GIs over the incursion against the Japanese. These six young men raising the flag came to symbolize all of America coming together to beat back a totalitarian aggressor.

Our current debt crisis we face today is different, but we still need all of us to pull together. But we can do this. That's our hope. We will push forward. We will proclaim liberty throughout the land. And we will do so because we, the people, will never give up on this great nation.

So God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/POLITICS/01/25/sotu.response.bachmann/