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Tag: outrageous claims

Bachmann’s Silence Is Golden

Steven Miles and Arthur Caplan are my new heroes. They should be yours, too — if you hold the radical opinion that facts matter.

Dr. Miles, a University of Minnesota bioethicist, offered $1,000 to charity if Michele Bachmann can prove a link she suggested between vaccinations for human papillomavirus and intellectual disability. Dr. Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Bioethics, upped the ante on Miles’ offer, adding $10,000 of his own.

Bachmann, the frequently facts-challenged Minnesota congresswoman who wants to be president, wandered into this thicket during a recent GOP debate in Tampa, Fla. She attacked Texas Gov. Rick Perry for an executive order requiring girls in that state to be vaccinated for HPV or, as Bachmann put it, to receive “a government injection.”

It was an obvious attempt to tap that rich seam of anti-government ferment that runs through the body politic. Later, in interviews with Fox “News” and the “Today” show, she spoke of a woman who came up to her crying after the debate.

“She said her daughter was given that vaccine. She said her daughter suffered mental retardation as a result of that vaccine.”

And how difficult is it to imagine a scenario where that irresponsible remark pays off in tragedy? HPV causes cervical cancer. If some child now dies of that disease because her parents were made paranoid of “government injections,” much of the blame will lie with Bachmann.

When she found herself pilloried by doctors, pundits and even her own ideological soulmates, Bachmann responded that she wasn’t speaking as a doctor or scientist, but only as a mother. It’s a remarkably disingenuous excuse, reminiscent of Sen. Jon Kyl saying in April that an outlandish claim he made about Planned Parenthood “was not intended to be a factual statement.”

Still, it beat the usual strategy of doubling down on stupid, seeking some loophole through which the incorrect can be proven correct. You saw this when Bachmann was hammered on her ludicrous claim that the Founding Fathers worked “tirelessly” to end slavery.

As proof, she trotted out John Quincy Adams who did, indeed, work to abolish slavery. Too bad he was all of 8 years old when the nation began. He was a Founding Child, perhaps, but a Founding Father? No.

But the fact is, facts don’t matter much to Bachmann. She is the avatar of a slimy ethos newly prominent in American politics and life. It is the elevation of end over means, the binding of conscience and the gagging of integrity. It is permission to say whatever outrageous thing will give you advantage, to lie your natural backside off if it will win the argument.

Facts? True believers don’t need no stinking facts.

Or, as Stephen Colbert famously observed, it is no longer necessary that a thing be true. It is enough that it be “truthy.”

Except that it really isn’t enough. Facts don’t stop being facts just because you ignore them. So we are indebted to Miles and Caplan for putting their money where Bachmann’s mouth is, requiring her to put up or shut up. In failing to respond to their challenge, she has effectively chosen the latter.

And she says more by her silence than ever she did with words.

(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for the Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132. Readers may contact him via e-mail at lpitts@miamiherald.com.)

(c) 2011 The Miami Herald Distributed by Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Did Marriage Equality Kill The Economy?

Is same-sex marriage the root cause of America’s economic woes? According to Republican presidential candidates Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, the answer is yes. Over the past two days, both conservative candidates made the case that marriage equality posed a grave threat to the future of the American economy.

On Tuesday, Gingrich argued that there is a clear connection between the “attack” on the traditional family and the struggling economy.

“The very basis of our belief and freedom is that we believe we are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights. The very source of our strength is that we believe these are truths…and so there’s a core absolute overlap between free enterprise, freedom and freedom of faith. And if you don’t have freedom of faith in the end you’re not going to have free enterprise because there’s no moral force that defends and protects you.”

Not to be outdone, on Wednesday Santorum argued that “moral failings” are at the heart of our economic problems.

“If you think that we can be a society that kills our own, and that disregards the family and the important role it plays, and doesn’t teach moral values and the important role of faith in the public square, and then expect people to be good, decent and moral when they behave economically, if you look at the root cause of the economic problems that we’re dealing with on Wall Street and Main Street I might add, from 2008, they were huge moral failings…Capitalism requires some strong modicum of moral consciousness if it’s gonna be successful.”

Something tells me that this isn’t what James Carville had in mind when he first warned that “it’s the economy, stupid!”

Bachmann: I’ll Reverse Global Trends And Push Gasoline Back Below $2/Gallon

Michele Bachmann said at an event in Greenville, South Carolina today that she’ll bring the price of gasoline back below $2 per gallon (averaged nationwide), despite it being well over $3.50 right now:

“The day that the president became president gasoline was $1.79 a gallon. Look at what it is today,” she said. “Under President Bachmann, you will see gasoline come down below $2 a gallon again. That will happen.”

Alexis Madrigal handles this one deftly:

This ignores the geological and geopolitical realities of the world oil market. It’s just impossible to promise the price of gasoline at some future date several years from now. Well, actually, I shouldn’t say that. Perhaps President Bachmann would institute price controls or spend massive sums to subsidize gasoline in an effort to drive gas prices down. The Chinese kept gasoline prices down for a while with heavy-handed efforts. But it’s hard to see how that squares with her small government posture. (To say nothing about whether that would be a good way to spend public money.)

Politico notes that she mentioned shale development and is a long time proponent of more Arctic drilling, but let’s look at the numbers. The United States Geological Survey estimates that there is a 50 percent chance of finding seven billion barrels of technically recoverable oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Sounds like a lot, no? But Americans use about 20 million barrels a day, so if we sucked out all of those billions of barrels, we’d use it up in less than a year. The shale guys are talking big, too, for sure. But we’ve already had one shale bust in this country. And most of the big successes have been with gas. And environmental tradeoffs still cloud shale’s future. And the USGS pegged the oft-cited Bakken formation as having a few billion barrels of technically recoverable oil. And shale oil production in 2010 was a mere 275,000 barrels a day.

Shorter version: this is an outrageous claim that flies in the face of reality. But when you’re speaking to Evangelicals who think the Rapture may well happen during their lifetime, perhaps that doesn’t matter.