Michele Bachmann, dumbest member of Congress?

To be deemed the stupidest member of Congress in these times would be quite a distinction. For years Michele Bachmann has been campaigning for the honor. Her bizarre misunderstandings about basic financial matters, for example, are legendary. Now I wonder whether she’s finally taken clear possession of that title. Speaking in New Hampshire on Friday about one of her favorite topics, the American Revolution, she showed that she has no understanding of the war’s most famous incident:

“It’s your state that fired the shot that was heard around the world, you are the state of Lexington and Concord (sic), you started the battle for liberty right here in your backyard,” Bachmann told a group of Republican activists at a fundraiser here on New Hampshire’s sea coast. “And the question to my fellow members of the House, and there are some, when will we start the battle for liberty in Washington D.C.?

This ignoramus then apparently repeated the same mistake to at least one other audience in NH on Saturday morning…and indeed more than once in the speech.

"What I love about New Hampshire and what we have in common is our extreme love for liberty," the potential GOP presidential candidate said. "You're the state where the shot was heard around the world in Lexington and Concord. And you put a marker in the ground and paid with the blood of your ancestors the very first price that had to be paid to make this the most magnificent nation that has ever arisen in the annals of man in 5,000 years of recorded history."

Politico’s story seems to refer to the same blundering speech on Saturday.

It’s bad enough to be ignorant of this seminal moment in American history. Worse still, Bachmann can’t be bothered to get basic facts straight even as she’s revving up a presidential bid. And she repeats her mistake without any apparent concern for accuracy, nor even an awareness that she’s blathering away in front of an audience that is surely far better informed than she is.

She must find that it pays to be ignorant.

crossposted at unbossed.com

Rand Paul: Coal miners have gotta die

This ought to go down well in rural Kentucky, far from his suburban base. Rand Paul implied this morning on ABC that sometimes coal miners just have to die. That’s the upshot of Paul’s perverse assertion that Americans shouldn’t be so ready to blame the mining corporations for disasters that occur in their mines. After complaining that the White House is unfairly blaming BP for its massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Paul added:

And I think it’s part of this sort of blame game society in the sense that it’s always got to be someone’s fault. Instead of the fact that maybe sometimes accidents happen. I mean, we had a mining accident that was very tragic and I’ve met a lot of these miners and their families. They’re very brave people to do a dangerous job. But then we come in and it’s always someone’s fault. Maybe sometimes accidents happen.

As a simple matter of fact, it always is someone’s fault when mining disasters occur. Mines are artificial. When they become deadly, it must be due to human agency. Nearly all deadly mining accidents in recent times are due ultimately to poor adherence to mining regulations, precisely because it costs money to uphold safety standards. No mining deaths are acceptable or excusable. Finding where fault lies in a mine disaster is exactly what the government should be doing, not looking the other way fatalistically.

Many commenters today have focused on Paul’s bizarre defense of BP, while nearly ignoring his even more shocking statement excusing the killing of coal miners. As environmentalists have warned for years, oil spills are a nearly inevitable part of offshore drilling (however badly BP screwed up in this case). It is not inevitable however that coal miners must die – at least not unless profits are put before safety. The notion that it’s a normal cost of business for a certain number of miners to die comes directly from the coal barons themselves. Even more than Paul has drunk deep from the oil companies’ wells, he has most shockingly imbibed the full ideology of the most ruthless coal corporations.

In his ABC comments Paul was trying to exculpate Massey Energy over the horrific disaster recently in one of its West Virginia mines, which took 29 lives. It was caused by methane gas buildup. Methane levels are strictly controlled for a reason. Had Massey wanted to spend the money, it could in fact have prevented any such buildup. The non-unionized Massey has long been notorious for its poor safety record. A single one of its mines in Pike County, Kentucky has been cited by MSHA for more than 3000 violations since 2005. This even though it appears from the immediate aftermath of the West Virginia disaster that inspections of Massey mines have been quite lax (MSHA suddenly began to find all manner of Massey violations that it had overlooked heretofore).

Rand Paul is simply indifferent or oblivious to the facts of the matter. Miners just gotta die because they do. That’s the privilege of the ideologue, to ignore the real world, actual history, and human suffering.

For Paul, an unfettered free market is a panacea for all of society’s problems…you know, the things created by government itself. Businesses can never be shown to be predatory or unscrupulous because that would tend to legitimize government regulation. Far better to let those miners perish, in the dark out of sight, than to rethink the purity of his ideology…not that it remains entirely pure whensoever the libertarian’s self-interest or personal preferences might be advanced through the agency of government. But hey consistency, hobgoblins and all that.

Speaking of consistency, political commentators in the corporate media have for more than a decade been insisting that the extremists on the right wing are mirrored by others on the left. That’s simply untrue. Specifically, there is no left-leaning equivalent of the fanatical Tea-baggers such as Rand Paul who would offer glib justifications for looking away when men are killed recklessly.

There used to be such leftists – all the way back in the 1930s, when some of Stalin’s apologists in America thought a few deaths here and there shouldn’t force them to rethink their rank ideology. But none of those clowns ever made their way into mainstream politics, most eventually smartened up and the rest long since faded into deserved obscurity.

By contrast, the unfettered-corporations-shall-be-our-saviours-but-taxes-are-the-spawn-of-satan kind of right-wingers have been very much with us without cease for more than a century. Their hold on the Republican Party is as strong as it has been for quite a while. There are plenty of these half-baked ideologues already serving in Congress, and now a truly pernicious version of this type has won the Republican Senatorial primary in Kentucky. There is no left-wing analog to the kind of craziness that has become mainstream within the Republican Party nationally, and there hasn’t been for decades.

Update: AP reporter Michele Salcedo interprets Rand Paul's comment on ABC as a reference to a smaller mine disaster at the Dotiki Mine in Kentucky, in which 2 miners died in a roof-collapse in April. Dotiki, operated by Webster Coal, has also been cited for safety violations many hundreds of times in recent months. Seventeen of those citations were for failing to secure the mine roof and walls adequately. And like Massey, the non-unionized Webster routinely contests many of the MSHA citations. The owner of Dotiki Mine, Alliance Resource Partners, has a miserable record of maintaining safety standards.

crossposted at unbossed.com

Further Annals of Illiteracy

The knee-jerk analysis of Instapundit is generally so slipshod as to merit no notice, but this op-ed is remarkable by even his own low standards. Glenn Reynolds argues that whereas the vast majority of Americans think the federal government lacks the consent of the governed, nearly two-thirds of our political rulers imagine that they do have this consent. And the other third who don’t “presumably, are comfortable being tyrants.” He construes a revolutionary scenario from this alleged chasm in perceptions (which somehow he likens to Schlitz beer), though Reynolds holds out hope that America can be “transformed” now without violence.

The chasm into which he thinks the country’s political structure is tumbling, however, is a figment of his own illiteracy.

Reynolds bases his argument on a poll that he hasn’t read carefully. The right-winger Scott Rasmussen produced a survey last month on public perceptions of whether the government has the consent of the governed. Only 21% of his respondents overall thought so, though 63% of a group he terms the “Political Class” believe that it does. Reynolds assumed for no apparent reason that the “Political Class” are politicians in Washington. That’s simply false.

Rasmussen for some time has been pushing the Republican-friendly notion that the nation is divided between a group of “Mainstream Americans” who have a “populist” distrust of government, and a group Rasmussen tendentiously calls the “Political Class”, that is to say people who have considerable trust in government. To identify these notional groups, Rasmussen regularly asks the following three loaded questions of poll respondents - the apparent intent being to show that a large proportion of the public has negative views of the (Democratically controlled) federal government.

The questions used to calculate the Index are:

-- Generally speaking, when it comes to important national issues, whose judgment do you trust more - the American people or America’s political leaders?

-- Some people believe that the federal government has become a special interest group that looks out primarily for its own interests. Has the federal government become a special interest group?

-- Do government and big business often work together in ways that hurt consumers and investors?
To create a scale, each response earns a plus 1 for the populist answer, a minus 1 for the political class answer, and a 0 for not sure.

Those who score 2 or higher are considered a populist or part of the Mainstream. Those who score -2 or lower are considered to be aligned with the Political Class. Those who score +1 or -1 are considered leaners in one direction or the other.

Simplistic, leading and manipulative, yes, but clear in any case. Reynolds didn’t bother to read Rasmussen’s description of who comprised his “Political Class”. Either that or Reynolds decided it would be fun just to make things up and see how many fools fall for the stunt.