Bachmann wants to close imaginary embassy
In case you haven’t noticed yet, Michele Bachmann kind of does this thing where, when she speaks, Americans respond with a shake of the head, a palm to the face or a shudder in fear that she might actually capture the presidency.
Many are doing all of the above after her latest gaffe.Speaking from Iowa on Wednesday, Bachmann said that, if she were president, “we wouldn’t have an American embassy in Iran.”Now, if Michele Bachmann were president, America wouldn’t have a lot of things — namely, any future whatsoever. But for a high-ranking member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, one might expect Bachmann to be keen to some certain details — like how America broke ties with Iran after this only-kind-of-a-little-thing that happened with some hostages 30 years ago. It’s no big deal — it only lasted 444 days, but the kicker, I guess, is that the US hasn’t had an embassy there since.At best, Bachmann was drawing some sort of abstract comparison between herself and then-President Ronald Reagan — who was in office for less than an hour before Tehran released its American prisoners back in ’81 — in hopes of capturing the vote from a GOP crowd still grasping for a resurgence in Gipper-era right-wing ideologies that have largely since disintegrated. At worst, she knows nothing about the foreign policy of the country she wants to be in charge of.Given her tendency to regularly raise questions from the press because of her super power of continuously making hilarious mistakes, those at Bachmann HQ have gotten pretty good at racing to nip these kinds of things in the bud. Here’s the latest explanation, courtesy of the Bachmann camp:“Congresswoman Bachmann is a member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence and is fully aware that we do not have an embassy in Iran and have not had one since 1980 . . . She was agreeing with the actions taken by the British to secure their embassy personnel and was speaking in the hypothetical, that if she was President of the United States and if we had an embassy in Iran, she would have taken the same actions as the British.“Her remarks are being taken out of context, given that she has spoken on this subject several times in the past 24 hours and made it clear that she knew we did not have an Iranian embassy. As she has previously stated, President Obama has taken his eye off of Iran, the most significant security threat in the region, and allowed them the luxury of time to move toward obtaining nuclear weapons. She will never allow Iran to obtain nuclear weapons that would threaten our ally Israel and the United States.”Well, sure. Let’s give her this one. If this wasn’t the nail in the coffin, she still has some time to deliver.
