COMMENTARY | Sometimes politics is just flat-out amusing, especially when some type of Freudian psychology is going on with a politician. That seems to be the case with Michele Bachmann. The Minnesota Congresswoman and 2012 GOP presidential candidate, who has been pushing high poll numbers while coming under fire for various stances, past false statements, and her husband's therapy clinic, told reporters at the Capitol Wednesday that President Obama should tell the truth. Funny she should say that...
At the news conference, Bachmann, according to the Washington Post, said that Obama should "tell the truth" about the debt ceiling, stating that the President was hiding the fact that the federal government would be able to pay the interest on national debt should Congress fail to raise the debt ceiling by August 2. Bachmann favors allowing the deadline to pass. She has stated she will vote against any bill offered to raise the debt ceiling, legally the only way the U. S. Treasury can borrow money on which to operate. Should the debt ceiling not be raised, the government would shut down its nonessential services and begin defaulting on its debts, an event that many economists believe could have severe if not catastrophic effects on the American -- and, by extension, the world -- economy.
By some Freudian projection mechanism, Bachmann has taken her looseness with the truth (as evidenced by her Politifact file) and projected it onto President Obama in order to insinuate that he's lying with regard to the contentious and heated debt ceiling talks. And in some regards, he might be (such as the possibility that Social Security payments might not be made should the debt ceiling not be raised), but, then again, perhaps not. Much of the negotiations seem to be based on ideology and economic variables.
Still, Obama has said a lot of things about the debt ceiling -- and his concerns are like many Democrats and Republicans. They're are worried that not raising the debt ceiling could undermine America's credit rating in the world, raise interest rates, and kill a struggling economy, forcing the U. S. and the world back into recession.
Bachmann, however, predicts that nothing will happen if the debt ceiling is not raised and the government is forced into shutdown. She believes that the government will simply have to start making drastic spending cuts and divesting itself of programs that are unnecessary. She does not believe that it will affect the government as drastically as professed by Wall Street experts and leading economists, not to mention most Democrats and some Republicans.
But she doesn't know what will happen. And she is willing to take the chance that nothing will.
Most politicians are not.
Given the number of falsehoods and pants-on-fire lies that Politifact has caught her in, Bachmann might want to defer the demand that Obama tell the truth to one of her more truth-oriented colleagues. It might not get the President to be more truthful or less disingenuous about the debt ceiling, but the accusation, instead of being sadly amusing in a "takes one to know one" sort of way, might be taken as a bit more credible.
3 comments