Retired Pastor Ruminates

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R.Minn.), who has been reported to have Presidential ambitions, told prospective voters in Manchester, New Hampshire, “What I love about New Hampshire and what we have in common is our extreme love for liberty. You're the state where the shot was heard around the world in Lexington and Concord.”  Those battles were actually fought here in the Bay State.

This is not the first time that Bachman has gotten confused about our history.  A few days before her rebuttal to President Obama’s State of the Union address she gave a rambling and highly revisionist speech in Iowa that touted the freedoms of immigrants when they arrived in America.  She said then that: “It didn't matter the color of their skin, it didn't matter their language, it didn't matter their economic status.”  She also praised the founder fathers (including John Quincy Adams) who she said “worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States.”

Many of the founders, including George Washington and (famously) Thomas Jefferson in fact owned slaves, and while she was right that Adams fought tirelessly against slavery he was not a founder.  And the Constitution itself, which she considers a sacred document, defines a slave as 3/5 of a person.

This “three-fifths compromise” of 1787 is found in Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the United States Constitution:  “Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.”

You would think that a leader of a movement that calls itself the “Tea Party” after the BOSTON Tea Party would know something about our early history.  Boston is in Massachusetts.

But as Jillian Rayfield wrote in her blog today in The New Republic, “I'm starting to wonder if the Republican policy of recruiting its female political talent heavily from the beauty pageant circuit may not have some downside after all.”  I didn't say that, but it's something to ruminate on.

The head of National Public Radio had to resign this week because one of her fund-raisers told some prospective donors that many in the Tea Party were “seriously racist.” The donors were actually plants and made the statement public.  Oops! It was clearly an unwise and impolitic thing to say, especially as NPR was facing a funding vote in a Republican led Congress, but it was hardly a lie.   There have been well documented examples of racist rhetoric and signs at Tea Party rallies, and some of the animus against President Obama seems racist.  

So let’s not be too hard on poor Mike Huckabee for saying that President Obama was born in Kenya.  I don’t know about you, but I always confuse Kenya with Hawaii.  They’re both far away and they both have hot climates.  Yeah, I know one is an island and one isn’t (I can’t remember which) but they are practically the same.

And his mistake is not really his fault since Huckabee didn't get taught geography when he was a kid growing up in the Duchy of Grand Fenwick (see note below) because of Fenwickian proto-Republican budget cuts.

Besides, he wasn’t really putting down the President by saying he was born in Kenya. After all, think of the foreign policy and national security experience the President got from keeping an eye on the Russians across the Bering Straits, or is that someone else?

Huckabee is surely right that a history of foreign travel is a big liability for an American politician.  We know George W. Bush hardly ever traveled, so there you go.

(Note:  “The Duchy of Grand Fenwick is no more than five miles (8 km) long and three miles (5 km) wide and lies in a fold in the Northern Alps. It features three valleys, a river, and a mountain with an elevation of 2,000 feet (610 m). On the northern slopes are 400 acres (1.6 km2) of vineyards. The hillsides where the ground is less fertile support flocks of sheep that provide meat, dairy products and wool. Most of the inhabitants live in the City of Fenwick that is clustered around Fenwick Castle, the seat of government. About 2 miles (3 km) from the City of Fenwick is a 500 acre (2 km²) Forest Preserve that features a 20 foot (6.1 m) waterfall and attracts many birds that the nation claims as its own native birds.[1] The Duchy, ruled by Duchess Gloriana XII, is described as bordering Switzerland and France in the Alps. It retains a pre-industrial economy, based almost entirely on making wool and Pinot Grand Fenwick wine. It takes its name from its founder, the English knight Sir Roger Fenwick who, while employed by France, settled there with his followers in 1370. Thanks to Sir Roger, the national language is English.”  Wikapedia)


(Note 2.  One of my readers e-mailed me to correct me that Mike was actually born in Hope, Arkansas.  Well that does it for his presidential hopes, since we have had lots of presidents from Kenya and Hawaii but none from Hope, Ark.)

The assault on unions now taking place in Wisconsin and elsewhere seems to me to be part of a larger war in which the enemy has been defined as our great public institutions (of which we were once so proud), our schools and our cities and especially government at all levels.  All this in the name of an “economic responsibility” that is anything but responsible if it robs great masses of people of a decent wage, a sound education, and the kind of community services that make life livable.

In an address at Amherst College in 2007 entitled “A Great Amnesia,” the incomparable Marilynne Robinson said, “Now we speak of the great mass of people as workers who must be conditioned and pressed toward always greater efficiency, toward accepting lives they do not define or control, lived in service to some supposed greater good that is never in any humane or democratic senses their own good or their children’s good.”  (Harpers Magazine, May 2008)

If we balance budgets on the backs of our workers, our teachers, our firefighters and police, we will be creating a meaner and less equitable society.

The “Tea Party” movement went to the polls in droves last November to demand fiscal responsibility.  Is what is taking place in Wisconsin really what they wanted?  There is a tale making the rounds on the Net: “A unionized public employee, a Tea Partier, and a CEO are sitting at a table. In the middle of the table there is a plate with a dozen cookies on it. The CEO reaches across and takes eleven cookies, looks at the Tea Partier and says, "Look out for that union guy -- he wants a piece of your cookie.”

I am glad the workers in Wisconsin are putting up a fight.  Some things are worth fighting for.