Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Following Michele Bachmann's reasoning about ancestry leads us to...

Michele Bachmann claims that an aide of Hilary Clinton, Huma Abedin, may have connections to the Muslim Brotherhood.  I'll let you try to follow this path with

"McCain defends Clinton aide against allegations", Associated Press, Donna Cassata, 2012-07-18  and other sites
"Michele Bachmann Lies About Her Own Family History To Sound More Iowan", Chris Rodda, Dispatches from the Creation Wars

I guarantee if you are not a lawyer or a historian, your mind will be boggled by all the twists and turns.

However, using her own reasoning, how can we be sure she didn't support the German Occupation of Norway?  After all, Quisling was a Norwegian.   And when you go back seven generations in a country the size of Norway, just about everybody is a cousin at that many levels.

Her last name is Bachmann, a German name.  How do we know her husband is not a cousin at some level to officials of the Nazi Party?  For example, Christian Bachmann, a major in the Waffen SS, or Erich Bachmann, a lieutenant in the Waffen SS.

Many have accused Bachmann about being a neo-Nazi.  That is a bit of a stretch, and even if true, I doubt that her current beliefs come from her ancestry or family relations.  She was probably shaped by the current version of the Republican Party as much as she is trying to shape the Party.

Oh, wait a minute!  George Seldes in the "The Great Quotations" gave a couple of quotes from Adolph Hitler about business.  Since those quotes seem to parallel Michele Bachmann's thinking, she must be a Nazi.  But I can't find my copy of "The Great Quotations".  Besides, I saw some indications on the Web that Seldes wasn't always accurate in his quotations.

The moral: it is bad thinking to put too much into a single quote and it is bad thinking to write too much about a simple idea.