Do you have a problem with Michele Bachmann serving on the House Intelligence Committee? Do you think anything could possibly go wrong? I don’t know, but I think slots on the intelligence committees should be reserved for people who are serious legislators, not the political bomb-throwers. I also think it would be nice if the people on the committees, including the chairmen, knew something about the world before they were given access to our secrets and the responsibility for doing oversight. No one thinks Michele Bachmann knows anything about geography or foreign countries or really anything of relevance to our national security or foreign relations. She’s also not exactly a discreet person. She’s close to the last member of Congress I’d trust to keep a secret or protect a secret from inadvertent disclosure.
The fact that she is quite possibly insane in a true clinical sense is an almost superfluous complaint. Don’t you think?
This all must be an April Fools joke. Right? And climate change denier Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL) — the guy who thinks that man can’t really destroy the planet because the Bible says only God can — To head Environment subcommittee.” (http://tinyurl.com/22p9qzl)
What could possibly go wrong.
No it isn’t … and it’s just further proof that the GOP doesn’t give a sh-t about governing .. they just want to make a mockery of it all
Michele Bachmann and intelligence? That will be like matter combining with antimatter. There may be some kind of cosmic implosion or something.
Time to reread the Easter Island chapter of Jared Diamond’s Collapse – yes a flourishing civilization can reduce itself to a state where centuries of marginal existence, including cannibalism, ensue (or wipe itself out, reread the Anasazi chapter)
Speak for yourself. Personally, i am grateful that the president pursued bipartisanship at all costs, even if that meant watering down and weakening important, even inspiring, legislation to get that one precious GOP vote. Getting that bipartisan imprimatur was much more important than passing legislation that would have made them that voted in 2008 enthusiastic about voting in 2010.
Anyone who says anything different is a sanctimonious purist, and a member of the professional left.
PS: i just sent in my OFA-endorsed letter to the editor, about how freezing federal salaries is good policy.
PS: I just sent in my OFA-endorsed letter to the editor, about how freezing federal salaries is good policy.
I hope you’re pulling our collective leg.
Come now–I could smell the snark from here…
Seriously–maybe it might help to have somebody as paranoid as Bachmann on the Intel committee…..if only to show the rest of teh committee what they sould be avoiding insofar as bad policy…
I am pulling your leg so hard it’s a wonder the thing hasn’t come detached!
it’s all very well and good to groan about the awful republicans. But if someone had fought for policies that had majority support and that had real stimulative effects, maybe we wouldn’t be in this boat right now.
but hey, Arlen Specter got to shrink the stimulus until it was way too small, and got rewarded with a presidential endorsement for the Senate. And rich people got an estate tax cut, so it all worked out.
This makes sense. The intel community wants people who fall for its propaganda as its overseers. She’s the perfect “useful idiot” the intel agencies love.
She already fell for that disinfo on India Daily re the “cost” of Obama’s trip to India. So her credentials, from the intelligence agency perspective, are impeccable. She’ll fall for anything they put out. That’s exactly who they want overseeing them.
Curveball 2.0
This is pretty much how democracy works, though, isn’t it? It’s not like we have a technocracy, where only the best and brightest get to be leaders. We have a democracy, where the dimmest of bulbs can rise to be a Congressperson or a President. Hell our selection process for political leaders has little to do with their actual effectiveness or skillset, and more to do with their party’s ability to gerrymander districts and their own ability to talk bullshit. I actually doubt that Bachmann is the dimmest Congressperson ever to hold a seat either (have you read some of the stories out of the Congresses from the 19th century – I’m surprised some of those guys could even breathe).
It used to be that you could expect the party elites to cover up for the poor choices made by the electorate, but that time has lapsed. The Republican party has more Bachmanns in it these days than it does Richard Lugars, so it doesn’t surprise me at all that she is going to be sitting on the Intelligence committee.
It does strike me that Republicans in recent years have lost the plot to their own game plan. It used to be that Republican politicians were working to prove that government was a bad solution for domestic issues while they simultaneously worked to make sure the US had the most aggressive and capable foreign policy in the world. These days, Republicans seem to be hell bent on showing that government is a bad solution for all issues – both domestic and foreign. Stuff like this is just the natural result of the lost plot.
Less concerned with the crazy, and more concerned with the serious:
http://my.firedoglake.com/deanbaker/2010/12/20/saving-social-security-stopping-obamas-next-bad-deal/
Yeah. I used to vigorously defend to conservative friends, some of whom are about my age, the silliness of the notion that SS would just not be there for us.
Now even I am beginning to have some gnawing doubts with the recent direction things have taken under Obama’s direction.
My ongoing nightmare is that I will have guests visiting from Norway or Denmark or Belgium, and I will have to explain America to them.
Relax. They know more about what America’s up to than you do.
Yeah, you might have to explain where and when we got so fucked up.
when, not IF, but WHEN she leaks national security secrets, the GOP BETTER NOT SAY SHYT.
Is there intelligence at all on the Intelligence Oversight Committees, or are they all both Democrats and Republicans enablers of whatever the intelligence community wants to do?
How would you know if Michele Bachmann’s presence on the committee changed anything?
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