Incredible Michele Bachmann Speech Gets Every Historical Fact Wrong

Why does Michele Bachmann like the history of the founding fathers so much? Because, apparently, you can just make it up as you go along! Listen ye children as we do a "close read" of this speech and discover the many amazing improvised historical facts Michele Bachmann made up for us.

Let's skip past the "the Tom Addison, the Tom Adams, err, John Adamses" part of this speech, and the part when she says immigrants are good, if they were born in the seventeenth century and were white. Cue it up to 9: 00 or so.

9: 30—Thomas Jefferson would be very interested to find out he plagiarized whole-cloth, without crediting those weirdo pilgrims, some sort of prayer thing from the Mayflower Compact. But it's her word against his, and he never raised millions of dollars and blanketed the air with teevee ads, so he automatically loses.

9: 40—Eighteenth-century America: "It didn't matter the color of their skin, it didn't matter their language, it didn't matter their economic status... it made no difference. Once you got here, we were all the same. Isn't that remarkable." Yes, yes it certainly is! Those black slaves and poor white indentured servants were idiots ! They didn't realize they lived in a totally equal society, completely in line with one another. They just thought they were de-jure or de-facto owned by other humans! Whoops! COLONIAL FAIL! (Also: If this sounds like socialism, it WASN'T. Michele says the Pilgrims didn't come over here for universal health care, so there.)

10: 20—"We know there was still slavery that was still tolerated when the nation began." Oh! So, forget all that other shit she said? "But we also know that the very founders who wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States. And I think it is high time that we recognize the contribution of our forbearers who worked tirelessly, men like John Quincy Adams, who would not rest until slavery was extinguished in the country." She is really stressing the "tirelessly" here, because isn't it weird that the Constitution would have nothing about slavery in it? And how so many of its framers wanted slavery and owned slaves themselves? People like, let's see here, "the George Washingtons and the Thomas Jeffersons" she discussed earlier? They must have gotten pretty tired fighting Michele's "evil" people who owned slaves (themselves). So tired, in fact, that though they "would not rest" until they finally saw slavery banned, they actually all died many decades before it happened! That just shows how dedicated the founders were. Their ghosts did more than half of century of grunt work on an issue they could have just solved in the Constitution without so much bloodshed.

11: 15—"We were a self-correcting country." Yes, that sure is one way to describe it.

12: 30—"Did you ever think in your lifetime that you would see the federal government purchase the largest car companies in the United States." No. Because most people, those of us who believe in things like "sales figures" and "reported profits" realize GM and Chrysler aren't the two largest car companies in the United States. There aren't even the two largest American car companies in the United States. And the government didn't even really buy these companies: one is a private company, and the other is publicly traded. You know what this means? Toyota and Ford are probably owned by the government too, and all cars are made by welfare queens in Mexican slums built between the local Lowe's and Home Depot. Also, the country didn't buy those banks she listed. And Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were set up by the government and were government-sponsored enterprises. But whatever, she's been right about everything up to this point in her speech, right?

Anyway, your next president! She will be able to rewrite history at any point, whether it's the most ancient of history of humankind, or something she did five minutes ago. [via TPM ]