Courtesy of Jr. Deputy Accountant
Embarrassing.
Listen, we know no one pays attention in school. We know history is ignored by everyone except history buffs who are into that whole thing (JDA is guilty of skipping history class in high school, by that point TLP was likely working on his 3rd history PhD) and we know that we can, as a society assaulted with a constant stream of tweets, status updates and 24 hour news, barely remember what happened last week let alone in the last few centuries. Surely Bachmann isn’t the only one to make a mistake like this but really, Michele? Really?
Her entire team needs to be fired for sending her out there looking like that.
Then again, in her defense, if you ask an American elementary school kid about Abraham Lincoln’s position on slavery, you might be told that he fought bravely to free the slaves. The Great Emancipator, the textbooks call him.
That’s what I was taught, you too?
The truth, however, is that Lincoln, like Bachmann, was a politician just doing what he had to do. The Emancipation Proclamation was a political move, you’re a sucker if you believe anything else. Worse? Honest Abe offered good government money to pay off slave-owners to get their slaves out of town as part of his 1860 presidential campaign:
In 1860, the 3,185 slaves in the District of Columbia were owned by just two percent of the District’s residents. In April 1862, Lincoln arranged to have a bill introduced in Congress that would compensate District slave-holders an average of $300 for each slave. An additional $100,000 was appropriated
to be expended under the direction of the President of the United States, to aid in the colonization and settlement of such free persons of African descent now residing in said District, including those to be liberated by this act, as may desire to emigrate to the Republic of Haiti or Liberia, or such other country beyond the limits of the United States as the President may determine.
When he signed the bill into law on April 16, Lincoln stated: "I am gratified that the two principles of compensation, and colonization, are both recognized, and practically applied in the act."
And there’s this quote, which you should know if you are not a high schooler skipping history class: "My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could do it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.."
I bet Bachmann (or her dumbass speechwriters and/or sh*tty teleprompter technician) just read the same books everyone else has. I could see where it might be easy to have absolutely no idea what you are talking about when the foundation of public school is a pablum version of what could have possibly happened, packaged in the simplest, most watered-down way possible. God forbid any children be left behind when we’re manufacturing the past, right? No wonder no one wants to take history, by the time you get to college you’d have to start all over just to figure out what maybe might have happened.
Her failure last night goes way beyond one idiot saying dumb things in public.
