I'm working on the problem I call "Taking Michele Bachmann Seriously." It's a thing I wrestle with. Sure, she's a theocrat and a homophobe, and I usually take them seriously. But her particular version of theocracy and homophobia is also wedded to such an absurd view of history and government, and she's running for such an important position, that I just can't wrap my head around how she has....serious supporters. Contributors. A valid, serious campaign. I look at it, and half expect that I should see that is was crowds populated with cardboard standees that have been hanging on her every word--or expect that some political insider will admit that her campaign was some sort of grand put-on.
For which reason, I look at ideas like this with unwarranted ambivalence. Oh, ho hum. She would abolish the EPA and the minimum wage. Like she even could without acts of Congress!!! Har de har....hmmm. Except she isn't alone on those. Both the EPA and the minimum wage have been accused of interfering with the business of "job creators" by several Republicans over the years. She's just saying it very bluntly.
And that seems to win her some points.
If we were to look a little more closely at what the EPA does for people who drink water or breathe air, or how the minimum wage protects workers, we might arrive at why what she says is so incredibly wrong. For example, the EPA works to bring companies into compliance with clean air and water laws and tests and fines companies who break the law--which means those companies put potentially dangerous chemicals in the water people drink and bathe in, and in the air we all breathe, even knowing there is an agency out there watching them--
You think they won't if there was no such agency? Who would do it? They aren't the bad guys! The people who think it's just the price of doing business that you shower in a little more dioxin are the bad guys. The EPA are like sheriffs trying to bring order to the wild west of corporate pollution. They are totally White Hats.
Does Michele Bachmann think it's okay for people to drink more arsenic? To bathe their kids in flammable water from fracking? To breathe in lead dust? Because that's the kind of thing the EPA makes sure we aren't unknowingly doing, by keeping an eye out on the people who would slip a little poison into everything. You know--to create jobs.
Oh, and speaking of jobs--did you know the current minimum wage is something that you can't actually even live on in this country, right now? She might think that jobs are leaving this country because American workers are too demanding--but wait! This is America, after all! Shouldn't we be? Is there some reason we need to expect less? Are our workers overvalued in her opinion?Michele Bachmann needs to come clean! Tell your potential voters, Congresswoman, why they each, individually, need to be paid less! Tell them why they can't make more money than anyone in any other country! Tell them how they should be happy if they simply get a job--any job at all, without getting ahead or saving a nest egg. Tell them surviving is enough. Don't be surprised if they don't like hearing that--because it's bunk.
This one Michele Bachmann made the historically inaccurate statement that the Founding Fathers worked tirelessly to abolish slavery. In a short time in office, she means to enshrine wage slavery. While she's at it, why not suggest that employers subtract all the costs an employee incurs in the course of their shifts and recreate debt bondage--or join Rick Perry and confess that a worker might sometimes be worth more dead than alive?
These things she says should seem more radical than they do--that she says them might soften the horribleness of them because we don't take her seriously: but even if she is no winning candidate, her ideas are heard and shared by others in her party and are noxious. That should be enough to make sure just a little more attention gets paid.
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