Video: Republican Sen. John McCain is defending a longtime aide to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton against unsubstantiated allegations that her family has ties to Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood.
The former charge may not pass the smell test or be based on any public evidence, but it’s not too far afield that many would disbelieve it. After all, Iran is the bad guy.
The latter would be a scandal the likes of which this country has rarely — if ever — seen. And Bachmann is making the allegation against American citizens.
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She The People’s Suzi Parker reported that Bachmann may stand to benefit from the attention that the controversy has received:
Such ganging up on Bachmann, though, only fuels her faithful supporters and those who think the Obama administration harbors a pro-Islamist agenda.
Several conservative sites have launched campaigns in support of Bachmann’s call for an investigation, and one called her a “Romney VP prospect.”
She’s incredibly savvy at appealing to conspiracy theorists.
She once said that President Obama wanted Medicare to go bankrupt so that the elderly would have to enroll in Obamacare.
Bachmann has often talked about a one-world currency and criticized national community-service camps, which she calls “re-education camps,” in which those involved get “trained in a philosophy that the government puts forward and then they have to go to work in some of these politically correct forums.”
Since Obama was elected in 2008, she has sounded an alarm about the nonexistent threat of sharia law in the United States and supported the birther movement.
“I’ll tell you one thing, if I was ever to run for president of the United States, I think the first thing I would do in the first debate is offer my birth certificate, so we can get that off the table,” she said before throwing her hat into the presidential ring.
So far, her rhetoric has only helped her career.
Bachmann’s allegations came shortly after Mitt Romney's former Chief of Staff John Sununu’s comment that he wished “this president would learn how to be an American.” She The People’s Mary C. Curtis argued that this sort of attacks, which have been recurring, could represent a sort of “new McCarthyism”:
This year, Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) echoed the language of senator Joe McCarthy when he said, “I believe there is about 78 to 81 members of the Democratic Party that are members of the Communist Party,” and he didn’t back down.
It’s troubling when Sununu, Bachmann, West and so many others are only too willing to take on the un-American job of deciding who belongs in America, the first and only one rule being, agree with us on matters of politics and policy or — as West instructed liberals — get out.
Where are all the voices of reason to pull them back, to ask, as the Army’s lawyer Joseph Welch once asked of McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency?” McCain has stepped up; who’s in line behind him?
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