Kommandant B: raising the Stupid bar higher

Althoiugh Fred Kaplan's piece in Slate on the "commander in chief" GOP debate/televised car crash is worth reading in its entirety, the always entertaining Kommandant B provided some more howlers that really, really make me think that she's either a Manchurian candidate or keeps getting elected by the most intelligence-free congressional district in America.

Kaplan:

My favorite remark in Saturday night’s “commander in chief” debate, in which the Republican presidential candidates answered questions about national security in one-minute sound bites, came from Michele Bachmann. "If you look at China, they don't have food stamps," she said. "They don't have the modern welfare state, and China's growing," she exclaimed, adding: "And so what I would do is look at the programs that LBJ gave us with the Great Society and they'd be gone."

Uh huh. Sure. She can't possibly be that in the dark about Chinese history since, say, 1949, can she? Or the fact that post-Mao  Chinese capitalism is largely based on the three-legged monster of low wages, wholesale intellectual property theft and a repressive state apparatus that quells any attempts at political protests as harshly as possible?   

She can't be that dense, can she?

On second thought...

Bachmann leapt in to say she’s fine with waterboarding, too, and complained that, under President Obama, “the ACLU is running the CIA.” (Quick, somebody, tell David Petraeus!) She also made the astonishing claim that when our troops capture terrorists on the battlefield, there are no jails to lock them up in. (Somebody, tell the Army to set up detention centers!)

It's as if a comedy monologue writer somehow decided to run a fake campaign and decided to stay quiet on the subject of the stunt after he or she realized that (A) the candidate was actually gaining support among voters and (B) had a chance of winning no matter what batshit talking point the actor/actress playing the candidate was supposed to say next.

Welcome to the political landscape of 2011. Air sickness bags will be provided upon request.

Freedom for me, but not for thee (one of a continuing series)

Shorter Crockett Keller: "the Second Amendment is sacred and a right we should all be free to exercise - unless you're some dirty commie pinko satanist muslim or someone else I don't like."