A Terrible Mind is a Thing to Lose - Bachmann Disapproves of the Renaissance

Here's a curious conspiracy theory for you.

What if the people behind Michele Bachmann's campaign were merely trying to bring in a candidate who would make Sarah Palin look informed by comparison? And what if even they never dreamed that Bachmann might be a front-runner?

As it turns out, Bachmann does not just believe that constitutional amendments should not be forced onto the states. She thinks that the Renaissance represents a wrong turn in the history of the West. Read this if you're prepared for some mind boggling. An excerpt:

Tea party queen and Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann is convinced that America is sinking into tyranny. Why? In a remarkable profile of the candidate appearing in the Aug. 15 issue of the New Yorker magazine, the artistic flowering of the Italian Renaissance takes a beating for having done away with the god-fearing Dark Ages.

It would be hard to condense more ignorance into one thought than to doubt that the Renaissance was a great thing. During medieval times lives and people were short and brutish, even priests often could not afford Bibles to read, witches and heretics (essentially anyone who suspected of thinking independently) were burnt at the stake, and even a serf's right to take his bride's virginity might be challenged by the lord who ruled the land to which he was bound. The Dark Ages were unrelentingly wretched and it was the Renaissance and its package of trade, exploration, reliance on the empirical, spread of books, and emergence of law and order in the form of the nation-state that changed this.

I wonder if anyone has asked Bachmann what her position is on reviving witch trials.

The Wild Ignorance of the Wild Right

In a recent debate, Michele Bachmann stated that she would push for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, but would not force this on the states. There is so much about this simple statement of hers that is alarming. One, she shows an ignorance of the relationship between the laws and constitution that we would not even accept from a middle school civics student. Two, she is a front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination. Three, she represents the most influential group in politics today - the proudly ignorant.

So now we see the effects of this sort of wild naivete in politics. The surgeon whose sole qualification for doing the surgery was that his thinking had never been corrupted by med school has now proven that it would help if he knew simple, elementary things like how to stop blood flow. The country has been taken hostage by people who are ideological extremists but who don't even understand how politics work - creating, in their confusion, some absurd blend of theater and guerrilla warfare that has nothing to do with reason or compromise.

Of course, even the fact of a second, more severe recession would do little to dissuade their followers that they're wrong. Immune to reason and results, these people have an ideological agenda that requires purity of thought and adherence to uncompromising principles. You know, like the medieval church once advocated. And we know how well that worked out.

[addendum - your blog author continues the rant against the extremists who are attacking his country and portfolio.]

The debt limit negotiations are like a gunfight with someone pointing a gun at his own head.

It is not enough that the Republicans want to slash Medicare and Social Security. This week they decide to gut 401(k) plans and pension funds by driving the stock market to one of its worst weeks in years? Apparently the idea of retirement offends them? 

It is so odd that Republicans have the reputation as capitalist. In fact, under Republican presidents the stock market has fared poorly; curiously, if you invested in the stock market only when a Democrat was president, you'd get 5X the return that you'd get when a Republican was president. Now, the Republicans essentially seize control of the economy for a week and the stock market quickly tanks - falling 4% in a single week. So, I guess it is safe to say that Republicans hate old people AND capitalism?