Michele Bachmann's State of the Union Tea Party Commercial - Page 2
This works well so long as the audience just buys the bullshit without checking any facts. But if people have even the slightest inclination to think for themselves, to actually understand the situation, the bald-faced nature of Bachmann’s nonsense shines through. It’s just too bad that so many people don’t care that the Stimulus actually staved off total collapse of the economy — that it added as much as 4.5% to the GDP, saved or created as many as 3.3 million jobs, kept unemployment from climbing to 11.5% or higher, and gave tax cuts to 94% of Americans. If they took the time to know the facts, they’d understand that the biggest problem with the Stimulus was that it was too small.
But the truth doesn’t always play well for the political goals of the speaker, so politicians and pundits are often forced to turn to propaganda — fact selection that results in lying by omission. According to Ms. Bachmann, while there had been “unacceptably high” deficits under the Bush administration, these “exploded” under Obama. She illustrates with a graph showing huge blue bars that tower above the short red Bush deficits, and she assigns all blame for the spending increases on President Obama.
Bachmann’s graph appears to be accurate, but like an iceberg, what’s seen on the surface doesn’t accurately reflect all that’s hiding below. And since the congresswoman doesn’t really want people to recall that her tallest blue bar, the one for 2009, actually reflects President Bush’s budget through October, or that it included much of the $700 billion “bailout” that was passed under Bush, she conveniently leaves these details out. And so what if she failed to mention that those little red bars didn’t include the spending for the two deficit-expanding wars that President Bush chose to keep off the budget. If President Obama didn’t want the billions in war expense reflected in his budget, he should have kept the costs hidden.
But as disingenuous as is Bachmann’s Tea Party spin on jobs and the deficit, there’s really nothing more egregious than the distorted fantasy of fear mongered hype she spewed regarding healthcare reform. In Bachmann’s words, “Unless we fully repeal Obamacare, a nation that currently enjoys the world’s finest healthcare might be forced to rely on government-run coverage that could have a devastating impact on our national debt for even generations to come.” What a crock!
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