It's really quite remarkable, how Michele Bachmann can manage to score a direct miss on virtually every historical concept or event. It's as though she actually comprehends this stuff inside and out -- that is, she knows precisely how to miss the mark, like the jazz singer of perfect pitch, Jo Stafford, who would expertly hit a sour note for amusement -- otherwise she would, out of dumb luck if nothing else, occasionally say something correct.
Her latest, from Iowa's Conservative Principles Conference: "The idea of liberty is so great and yet so precious ... the founders recognized it could only be entrusted to the brain trust [of voters]."
One gathers that the founders were entrusting liberty to voters whenever they weren't preoccupied with eradicating slavery from the former colonies. But of course Iowa's Conservative Principles Conference unveiled what the founders feared most: herds of ill-schooled, ill-bred, emotional buffoons who would convert the power of enfranchisement into the power of a government incited and led by equally witless demagogues such as Michele Bachmann.
There is no educating some people and the founders knew it; they envisioned whole covens of little Bachmanns who would scream in ignorant delight at every enticing imbecility bellowed by those who would grossly mislead them. Thus the founders erected massive barricades between government and democracy mobocracy, separating as best they could higher "elected" officials (senators and presidents) from the electors, and hoping that the People's House, overloaded with big Bachmanns, did not in short order bring the entire structure down.
Of course not all demagogues are witless, a la Ms. Bachmann. Some are simply dishonorable. Yesterday, for example, I extinguished a few irretrievable minutes of my life by watching on C-Span the Most Right Dishonorable Newt Gingrich, also appearing at Iowa's CPC, who uttered without even a tinge of shame that on Libya he had been entirely consistent: if inconsistencies there seemed, it was only because he was trying to keep up with Obama's. Captain Queeg was more believable -- and a thousand times more honorable.
This I observed after also watching a minute of Bachmann's history tutor on White Citizens Councils, Haley Barbour, who informed CPC's audience that our sitting president, whose reelection depends on lower unemployment, is trying -- deliberately -- to kill jobs. The audience found Mr. Barbour's insight to be of impeccable logic.
But then, as noted, came Mr. Gingrich. And a man can only take so much. So I flipped the political atrocity of CPC off and reached for Albert Camus' The Rebel, who drearily crawls his way out of nihilism, absurdity and despair. Hey, when you find spiritual uplift in mid-20th-century French philosophy, you know you've hit bottom.
I sense digression. Back to Iowa, and CPC, and Bachmann & Co.'s imbeciles, all of which I'll leave in the capably terrified hands of Doug Gross, "a Republican activist and former nominee for governor," who told the NY Times: "If Iowa becomes some extraneous right-wing outpost, you have to question whether it is going to be a good place to vet your presidential candidates."