This is getting less and less funny and almost painfully embarrassing. Presidential candidate Michele Bachmann began a rally in Spartanburg SC earlier today by saying, “Before we get started, let’s all say ‘Happy Birthday’ to Elvis Presley today.”
Actually, today is the anniversary of his untimely death in 1977; Elvis’s birthday is January 8.
Some time ago Bachmann delivered a formal (and unintentionally comical) speech on the floor of the House of Representatives blaming the Great Depression on Franklin Roosevelt and the Democrats for passing the “Hoot-Smalley Tariff.” Of course, there was no such tariff, though Republicans — over nearly unanimous Democratic opposition, including from then-candidate FDR — did pass the Smoot-Hawley Tariff in 1930. (And now-Senator Al Franken used to play a character named Stuart Smalley on SNL.) Incidentally, while the tariff in question did economic damage, economic historians recognize bigger contributing causes for the Great Depression.
Representative Bachmann also told New Hampshire crowds on at least two separate occasions that the Shot Heard Round the World was fired in Concord, New Hampshire, when of course that happened at the Concord in Massachusetts. And more recently she incorrectly said in Waterloo, Iowa, the city of her birth, that John Wayne has been born there as well. Actually, John Wayne was born about 150 miles away in Winterset, but serial killer John Wayne Gacy was born in Waterloo.
In other news Rick Perry complained to a Des Moines IA crowd about a government requirement that farmers have a commercial driver’s licence simply to drive a tractor across a road. In actual reality, no such requirement exists.
Perry claimed to have heard about the outrage just a few days ago from Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), but according to Grassley’s office, the senator has just last week published on electronic newsletter telling constituents that the federal Department of Transportation was opposed to such a regulation.
It’s been said that Perry and Bachmann appeal to the same subset of Republican voters…
(Yes, I know Casey Stengel originally asked “Can’t anybody here play this game?” but I’m here and the people I’m talking about are, thank goodness, there.)
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When I see Bachmann, Perry or Palin saying something really nuts (which of course happens often) – I think about a line in the movie “A Few Good Men.”
Oddly enough, it was Tom Cruise’s character who said at one point –
“Should we or should we not follow the advice of the galactically stupid!”