Retired Pastor Ruminates: Political facts

Showing posts with label Political facts. Show all posts

Sunday, March 13, 2011

“Don’t Know Much about History:” Michele Bachmann stumbles with the facts again

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.

Saturday, March 12, 2011

My top ten “opinions” that might get you fired

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.

A survey by the University of Washington Institute for the Study of Ethnicity, Race & Sexuality examined the racial attitudes of Tea Party sympathizers. Their conclusion: “The data suggests that people who are Tea Party supporters have a higher probability”—25 percent, to be exact—“of being racially resentful than those who are not Tea Party supporters,” says Christopher Parker, who directed the study. “The Tea Party is not just about politics and size of government. The data suggests it may also be about race.”

And last July the NAACP told the Tea Party movement to repudiate the racist elements in its midst. So the statement, while imprudent, was not without some factual basis.

So all this got me ruminating, and I decided, as yet another one of my high minded public service efforts, to share some other “opinions” that could get you in trouble:

Having civilians walking around with handguns is really dangerous and bad for society and should be regulated.
Evolution is the best scientific hypothesis to explain the change over time in the inherited traits found in populations of organisms.
President Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, and never lived in Kenya.
President Barack Obama is not a Socialist (in fact, he is a Democrat).
There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Drilling for deep oil in the Gulf of Mexico poses a serious threat to the environment.
Global warming is real and caused by humans.
The Bible was written by people and has a literary history and needs to be interpreted (the same is true of the Constitution.)
The health care bill was not a government takeover of health care, and never contained plans for any “death panels.”
The earth is not flat.

As the late great Daniel Patrick Moynihan is reported to have said, “Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts. ” If you want to get your facts straight, here are a couple of good web sites: http://factcheck.org/ and http://politifact.com/truth-o-meter/

Washington Post reporter David Broder died yesterday, and he was known to be a strict fact checker. Would that there were more like him.