The Terrifying Thought of Michele Bachmann as Commander-in-Chief

The butter-on-a-stick crowd in Iowa has spoken, and they want Michele Bachmann to be your next president. Not only has she won the Iowa straw poll, a recent poll showed that a plurality of Republican primary voters want to put Bachmann in the White House and make her our next Commander-in-Chief.

Republican primary voters in general — and the Tea Party in particular — want to give Bachmann control of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, all 5,113 nuclear tipped weapons, enough to end life as we know it here on Earth. And that alone should have every reasonable person in this nation ready to rise up and do whatever is required of us to “take our country back” from the lunatic fringe.

Because make no mistake about it, Bachmann is flat-out, bat guano crazy. And the idea of Michelle with “the bomb” should scare you.

Just for starters, Bachmann has made it clear that she believes we are in the “end times,” that “we are in the last days,” and that “the Harvest is at hand.” You can hear her say just that in this clip is from 2008.

Putting someone in control of the nuclear launch codes who believes that the world is about to end in a fiery apocalypse any day should make every thinking person in this country break out in a cold, clammy sweat. Especially since Bachmann thinks that a nuclear first strike might be the appropriate response to a cyber attack. Really and truly, in criticizing the current administration’s nuclear policy, Ms. Bachmann said:

“So if in fact there is a nation who is compliant with all the rules ahead of time … if they fire against the United States, a biological weapon, a chemical weapon, or maybe a cyber attack, then we aren’t going to be firing back with nuclear weapons?”

So under a Bachmann presidency, it’s: “Yo, China: You hack my Facebook, you’re all going down!”

It should cause a deep foreboding in everyone with a scintilla of concern about our ability to compete in a global economy to even contemplate the prospect of a gleeful science-denier like Bachmann directing our military, medical, and scientific research efforts. Bachmann doesn’t just deny the massive amount of science that supports global warming, and she doesn’t even believe in evolution, having said: “there is a controversy among scientists about whether evolution is a fact … hundreds and hundreds of scientists, many of them holding Nobel prizes, believe in intelligent design.” Saying that evolution is not settled science is like admitting that you flat-out don’t believe in science in general. Evolution is, beyond question, settled science. In order for evolution to be wrong, almost every branch of science that we study would have to be fundamentally flawed because all scientific fields strongly support evolution. Even our math would have to be wrong. Bachmann’s camp is apparently of the opinion that the “belief” that 2+2=4 is just more liberal spin from the “lamestream media.”

And it should give decent people a rash to even contemplate putting someone in charge of the largest economy in the world who doesn’t even smallest understanding of some of the basic concepts of economics. She claimed, for instance, that there was no need to ever raise the debt ceiling. At all, ever. As the non-partisan Factcheck.org pointed out, Bachmann’s notion, that we would just need to “prioritize” our debts and pay bondholders, Social Security and Medicare first, would require cutting the budget for everything else — the active military, military pensions, veterans benefits, judges, prosecutors, highway construction, food stamps, Medicaid services for low- and middle-income workers and all the rest of it — by 53 percent overnight. So just what was her plan going to be? Have the Coast Guard just rescue every other boat in peril? Pay half of our soldiers? Or pay all our soldiers just half?

Bachmann doesn’t even have a firm grasp of the reality of our nation’s history or of the Constitution. Besides the dopey gaffes she has made such as mistaking Concord, New Hampshire, for the spot in Massachusetts where the “shot heard ’round the world”” was fired, she has also claimed “our Founding Fathers worked tirelessly to end slavery.” She is apparently unaware that about a third of the delegates who attended the Continental Congress and approved the Constitution were slave owners themselves, and that they wrote protections for both the slave trade and slave owners right into the Constitution. Section 9 of Article I states that the importation of slaves would be permitted until 1808, and Section 2 of Article IV states that fugitive slaves must be returned to their owners. When questioned about it by ABC news, Ms. Bachman, apparently incapable of learning from her mistakes, just doubled down, insisting that Founding Father John Quincy Adams was against slavery. Bachman’s Founding Father John Quincy happened to be age 9 in 1776.

Bachmann seems to have a wide-ranging disdain for facts and reality in general. In a posting just a year ago, the non-partisan Politifact.org site noted: “After 11 encounters with the Truth-O-Meter, Bachmann continues to hold the rare distinction of an all-False/Pants on Fire record.”

And this is person the Tea Party wants to elect as your next president. This is the person a plurality of Republicans wants to see as your next Commander-in-Chief. This is the person that the Three Stooges of the Far Right Media — Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity — all so adore. If they have their way, Bachmann may one day soon have the bomb. God save us all.