Tom McGee's Blog

There’s lit­tle point in bash­ing every lit­tle thing that comes out of the mouth of Michele Bach­mann, but she’s hit two out of the park in a 24-hour span.

First she noted the strange and eerie coin­ci­dence of how swine flu out­breaks have only come dur­ing terms of Demo­c­ra­tic pres­i­dents. Like the plague of locusts under Pharoah, all caused by the sins of the Chief Exec­u­tive. Except that the out­break of Swine Flu in the ‘70s was will Repub­li­can Ger­ald Ford was President.

Then Wednes­day she blames the Great Depres­sion on the poli­cies of FDR, via the “Hoot-Smalley” tariffs.

Oops, it’s “Smoot-Hawley”, named after the two Repub­li­can con­gress­men who authored it, and signed into law by Repub­li­can Her­bert Hoover.

She’s a gift that keeps on giv­ing. Ygle­sias has an amus­ing take on it:

But her con­tention is sim­ply that Roo­sevelt, though he took office in March 1933, was actu­ally able to cause events in the past pre­cip­i­tat­ing the very years-long Depres­sion that led to his elec­tion. It’s a bit con­fus­ing, yes. And some­what meta­phys­i­cally con­tro­ver­sial. But not at all some­thing she deserves to be mocked for.

[no, not really—she should be mocked]