Michele Bachmann and me

Some more politics: Surely you're familiar with Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), right-wing loony toon and perpetual subject of lefty blog derision. She appeared on most people's radar shortly before the November election when she said she wished "the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out, are they pro-America or anti-America." This is the least of it; Wikipedia, naturally, sums up the toll of her verbal diarrhea, although her official website is enlightening in its own way.

(By the way, as a former Minnesota resident, I am indeed ashamed that anyone in that fair state would vote for a nimrod like this, but I believe that 90 percent of the Republicans in the state are concentrated in her district. True, that doesn't account for Norm "Crybaby" Coleman, but don't get me started.)

Bachmann's had a couple of new doozies in the past couple of days. First, she noted that it was "interesting" that "back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat President, Jimmy Carter." Of course, that last flu scare was 1976, when Gerald Ford—a Republican—was in charge. Then today, she subscribed to the single stupidest anti-Obama canard of the past few months: that spending during a recession was proved faulty when the New Deal plunged the nation further into the Great Depression. Specifically, she blamed FDR for massive unemploymentt, due to his implementation of the "Hoot-Smalley" tarrifs.

First of all, Thomas Paine here is referring to the Smoot-Hawley tariff, signed into law in 1930 by President—yep—Herbert Hoover, a Republican. Furthermore, both Smoot and Hawley were GOP senators. Dumb-ass.

But perhaps I'm being too harsh. After all, as I alluded to here, I am not innocent of making faulty statements about the history of American government. In fact, Monday night, I asked you all this monumentally stupid question:

Q: 1987 was the first year what kind of person was elected to the U.S. Senate?

I have no idea why I ever wrote this down and how I ever determined that this was a valid question for the quiz. Problem A is that there wasn't even a Senate election in 1987. More importantly, my intended answer—a woman—is so completely off the mark, I should be shot with a blunderbuss. The question would have worked if I had said 1930—57 years earlier—when Arkansan Hattie Caraway was elected.

To make up for it, here's a nice photo of the current women in the Senate:
I can name every one of these ladies. In fact, I can name all 100 currently serving senators (along with most of the governors). So let's call Monday temporary batshit insanity. And for the next week, feel free to call me Quizmaster Bachmann.