[UPDATE] Thanks to TPM for the shout out...
It has become something of a full time job keeping up with the crazy things that are coming out of the mouth of my representation in Congress. While other people are focusing on her recent comments about Democrats and swine flu in a Pajamas TV interview, her speech about the first 100 days of President Obama on the floor of the House of Representatives has gone largely unnoticed.
In that speech she practices her own special brand of historical revisionism by crediting President Calvin Coolidge for getting us out of the Post-WWI recession despite the fact that by the time he became President the recession was over. Later, she blames the passage of the Smoot-Hawley Act on Roosevelt despite the fact that it was passed a few years before Roosevelt became President and was enacted by a majority Republican Congress and signed by a Republican President.
It has become something of a full time job keeping up with the crazy things that are coming out of the mouth of my representation in Congress. While other people are focusing on her recent comments about Democrats and swine flu in a Pajamas TV interview, her speech about the first 100 days of President Obama on the floor of the House of Representatives has gone largely unnoticed.
In that speech she practices her own special brand of historical revisionism by crediting President Calvin Coolidge for getting us out of the Post-WWI recession despite the fact that by the time he became President the recession was over. Later, she blames the passage of the Smoot-Hawley Act on Roosevelt despite the fact that it was passed a few years before Roosevelt became President and was enacted by a majority Republican Congress and signed by a Republican President.
Apparently history isn't your thing Michele...
5 responses to "Bachmann And History Don't Mix..."
Would you please get around to unelecting your bat guano loonie representative? I'm so done with her already. She needs a better matched hobby than playing 'Congress'. May I suggest Alchemy.
Come on, this was not a mistake on the part of this ever-cagey woman.
I must admit that I don't know who Hoot is, but I do know who Smalley is.
In advance of his inevitable seating as a Senator from her home state, Michelle is setting the groundwork for blaming Al Franken for the Great Depression.
I am confused. According to the progressive narrative Herbert Hoover was a free marketeer who let the economy crash by not regulating it enough.
Does does that square with him signing Smoot-Hawley?
When we talk about regulation, we're usually talking about preventing our own industries from cheating us, not about tariffs imposed on imports from other countries.
The confusion on how Smoot-Hawley squares with regulation (like of or aversion to) is understandable. It becomes easier to understand when we recall that the Republican party has usually, for better or worse, been a party that represents the interests of big business. In the early Republic, the interests of nascent industry and then big business were best served by a protective tariff. Because the primary market of domestic producers was domestic consumers, Republicans supported a protective tariff to keep cheap foreign goods from overwhelming domestic producers. Hence the `protective' Smoot-Hawley tariff. Times have changed, however, and now that global markets rule, the business wing of the Republican party and the business (or new Democrat) wing of the Democratic party both support a low tariff.
More nationalistic/xenophobic/labor oriented elements on both the left end (Demies) and right end (Republicans) advocate protectionist trade policies.
The flip-side, of course, is that low tariffs bring in goods from countries with weak labor laws, nearly non-existent environmental protections, and artifically cheap currencies (e.g. China), so there's a very real human cost to low tariffs and globalization.