Lesson One:
Regardless of color, religion, class or creed, everyone was treated fairly once they got to America.
There were no slaves, no bigotry against Catholics or Jews, no bigotry against Japanese during WWII, against Germans in WWI, against the Chinese in the 19th century, no bigotry aimed against Mormons and forcing their exodus to Utah, against Muslims after 9/11 and certainly NO animus aimed at Native Americans even though they were audaciously encroaching on our land and our dream of White Man Infest Destiny.
Al-righty, then!
One is at a loss to wonder why Minnesota's 6th congressional district elected and keeps electing this intellectual hairball, someone who by conspicuous relief makes Sarah Palin look like a foreign relations wonk and Christine O'Donnell a Constitutional law professor.
In a world that makes total sense, Michele Bachmann should have been the Alvin Greene of Minnesota and laughed into obscurity with a hearty, national "Nyuk nyuk nyuk." Yet the media, Anderson Cooper aside, keep giving this Bible-banging lunatic enough house room that she can steal Congressman Paul Ryan's thunder to deliver her own Republican rebuttal to Obama's State of the Union Address.
And it would be easy to laugh Bachmann off the national stage on every occasion she's opened her pie hole except Bachmann doesn't stand out because she's fast becoming the standard bearer for the Idiocracy that is the latter day Republican Party.
Rand Paul said on Election night last November, "There is no rich, there is no middle class, there is no poor." One could've almost heard a watery Oriental nocturne by DeBussy and we could've called it "Delusions of the Socialist Aqua Buddha."
And Republicans make the late Howard Zinn and other historians aerate their graves at the rate of 30,000 RPMs every time they try to rewrite history in their desperate, pathetic Winston Smith attempts to quell any notion of class warfare.
Let's take stock: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 wasn't enacted until 101 years after the Emancipation Proclamation.
We have had exactly one Catholic President.
We have had exactly one full-blooded Native American in the Senate.
We have no African Americans in the Senate and still have not seated one from the South since Reconstruction.
Wingnuts foamed at the mouth and given serious consideration when Bachmann's fellow Minnesota congressman Keith Ellison, Congress's only Muslim, took the oath of office on a Koran.
Wingnuts are still foaming at the mouth over "the Ground Zero Mosque" that's actually a community center two blocks from Ground Zero, something already screamed about by none other than Bachmann.
Unemployed Americans are now being classified as hobos by other wingnuts who keep insisting that the unemployment insurance we need to barely stay alive is a form of welfare and not something into which we've been kicking 6.2% of our paychecks for decades.
There is something seriously, dangerous wrong with a country that not only tolerates and gives house room to such whiteboardings of history but actually elects and re-elects in many states other idiots like Bachmann. Our apathy, complacency, whatever you wish to call it, is what's dumbing down this country.
And, at the rate we're going, Bachmann's, Paul's and every Republicans' idiocy will become communicable (it's already airborne) and this may be the State of the Union Address we'll see a year from now.
