And Bachman, a Presidential candidate, doesn't know that J.Q Adams was not only NOT a founding father, but was born LONG after the founding fathers founding this country.
um, no he wasn't. He was born in 1767. When the Constitution was written, he was serving as an aid to his father.
Bachmann is correct to describe the Founders as she does - Washington educated his slaves and emancipated them upon his death. Many of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were abolitionists, including Benjamin Rush, John Jay (a president of the Continental Congress), Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and Benjamin Franklin. Even before there was a Constitution, the Founding Fathers prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territories (Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Minnesota and Wisconsin). Indeed, of the seven men most commonly named as the "Founding Fathers", five opposed slavery and the two who did own slaves were not very happy with it (those seven are John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and George Washington).
swizz said:
Because Obama is a pretty intelligent person, like his policies or not, so there really isn't much to compare this to because he doesn't make blatantly incorrect statements all that often. You will be able to come up with some other ones, but it is not on a consistent basis.
Should it Matter When Politicians Make History Mistakes?
...During the 2008 campaign Obama claimed that we should meet face-to-face with those we oppose just as Kennedy had met with Khrushchev when "We were on the brink of nuclear war." Except Kennedy's meeting with Khrushchev had occurred more than a year before the Cuban Missile Crisis and was regarded even by JFK as a failure. In fact, Khrushchev concluded from his meeting with JFK at Vienna that the young president would not be a barrier to an increased Soviet hardline as he went on to approve the building of the Berlin Wall and the placement of missiles in Cuba.
Also during the campaign he bragged about his uncle being part of the liberation of Auschwitz when it was the Soviets who liberated the camps in Poland. His uncle helped to liberate a satellite camp of Buchenwald. I would have thought that, if he were truly so proud of his uncle's service, he might have read up on those experiences and learned more about what actually happened.
At his inaugural, he didn't know how many men had been president double-counting Cleveland. That was a small error, of course, but you'd think that for an Inaugural Address he or his speechwriters would get it right.
Obama's aides seem so impressed with the boss that they have lost all historical perspective. Remember Rahm Emanuel telling Obama that he had faced the toughest times that any president has ever faced. Apparently, Obama and his aides only remember Abraham Lincoln when they want to reach for some strained comparison between the two.
Obama's sense of himself seems so grandiose that he can make boneheaded comments like claiming that the reason he was so unpopular in Texas is that "Texas has always been a pretty Republican state, for, you know, historic reasons." Apparently, this man who supposedly learned so much from the civil rights movement was unaware that the Democrats were the party of the solid South and that Texas had been a Democratic state since its admission in 1845 until Nixon's election in 1972. That was the historic gaffe that led Scott Johnson of Powerline to say that "Obama's historical ignorance could be a full time beat for somebody who does this work for a living".
More importantly, his whole approach to the Middle East displays a vast historical ignorance. In that same Inaugural he talked about seeking a "new way forward" for our relations with the Muslim world and a return to the "same respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago.". As
Charles Krauthammer pointed out at the time, Obama seemed ignorant of the true history of our relationship with the Muslim world....
So historical ignorance can be both embarrassing and crucial for a president. Critics shouldn't ridicule Michele Bachmann's errors unless they've also spent some time on Obama's errors.
Meanwhile, Bachmann just had a hilarious gaffe YESTERDAY.
funny you should bring this up. Obama yesterday had a rather entertaining gaffe where he screwed up and got his
own daughters' age wrong.
