My new favorite micro-generic hallmark of the Michele Bachmman news story is the phrase “and then she did this.” It crops up again and again in baffled coverage from veteran reporters, and I think it captures something particular about her. What Michele Bachmann says so consistently contradicts what Michele Bachmann just said that her weirdness seems inevitable, and yet it keeps managing to surprise. After a while, her political communication takes on the sort of art-for-art’s-sake quality one sees in, say, Dadaism. It makes so little sense that you must accept it only for what it is—and then she did this. What Bachmann did this time was tell The Today Show that an anonymous woman approached her after Monday’s debate to say that her daughter got inoculated for HPV, and then she “developed mental retardation.” Is Bachmann saying that you shouldn’t vaccinate your child against preventable disease? Is she saying the HPV vaccine retards you? No—that would be irresponsible. But she is saying that “this is the very real concern, and people have to draw their own conclusions.”
The other fun thing that happened at the debate
Google search results for "rick santorum"—note that the top result is a paid advertisement, and that the neologism is beating the original.
In all the chanting for death and keeping promises to seniors, we lost track of the other exciting development from the CNN Tea Party Republican Debate. Wolf Blitzer fielded questions from Twitter, one of which asked the candidates what they were doing to attract the Latino vote. Before Herman Cain could angrily shout whom?, Rick Santorum jumped on it:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PH8TJeP3MI
Santorum is doing the same thing to attract Latino voters that he’s doing to get votes from outside his personal church: nothing. When I first read this quote in print media, I assumed his “illegal—I mean Latino—voters” was a snide jab. Now I’m not so sure. We are talking about the man who, at the first Republican debate, said that if—when!—Rick Santorum becomes President, “the world as we know it will be no more.” Whether he just said illegal already and had it in his cache memory or was deliberately conflating ethnic identity with false citizenship, Santorum can be forgiven, because he was pursuing the objective of the debate: messing with Rick Perry.
The Tea Party Republican debate in three juxtapositions
Michele Bachmann, one of several candidates to agree that Social Security must be reformed but kept exactly the same for the largest voting bloc in America
Last night’s Republican debate was the ninth of 53 such events between now and November 2012, so maybe it didn’t seem totally important to watch it. You can probably close your eyes and see Herman Cain railing against the reading comprehension level of US policy right now. Much like the individual Republican candidates, the Republican debates have a sameness that prevents each of them from seeming strictly necessary. Any one is like the cracker that falls out of the box of Triscuits. It’s therefore understandable if you missed last night’s debate, but it’s also a shame, because it turned out to be the Triscuit with a vague image of Jesus on it. The CNN Tea Party Express Republican Debate tells you everything you need to know about the Tea/Republican Party in three easy juxtapositions. Or one juxtaposition of three elements, which also yields three juxtapositions. Let’s just let the math/usage wash over us and watch videos.
When does history happen?
My friend Tarik sent me the chart above pursuant to an unrelated thought experiment. It comes from the Economist, which compiled figures from little-e economist Angus Maddison and the UN to plot economic output and percentage of total human-years lived against centuries. A human-year is a particularly useful unit of history if you prefer the broad trend hypothesis to the Great Man Theory. As the Economist puts it, “if people do make history, as this democratic view suggests, then two people make twice as much history as one.” Fact: two people, each living 70 years, experience more human time—that is, history—than one person living 70 years. Given that the life expectancy of your typical eighth-century serf was like 28, the lion’s share of human experience has taken place in the last century.
Friday links: Let’s be real edition
Skin tone comparison! President Obama v. John Boehner v. leather chair (control group at left)
If you accidentally turned on football early, you might have seen President Obama rocking a joint session of Congress with his jobs speech last night. Here I should point out that I am not a trained economist. I am not even a gifted amateur. But regardless of whether the President’s jobs plan will actually create jobs, he finally put it in terms America needs to hear. Speaking of his, um, differences with the Republican party:
Maybe some of you have decided that those differences are so great that we can only resolve them at the ballot box. But know this: the next election is fourteen months away. And the people who sent us here—the people who hired us to work for them—they don’t have the luxury of waiting fourteen months.
Shit just got real. The rhetorical centerpiece of last night’s speech was “you should pass this bill right away.” It’s no Yes We Can—it’s not even a Win the Future—but it challenges the House and Senate in a way that foregrounds their intransigence. It also maybe acknowledged Obama’s willingness to be a one-term President. I’m still here for another year, he said like Dad when you are seventeen. The implicit threat was that, with less and less to lose, he is going to become a meaner adversary. And Boehner wept held his face completely motionless.