Welcome back to the Sixth District of Minnesota, the place that makes the Twilight Zone look like an island of sanity.
Andy Birkey of the Minnesota Independent just ran this in a story today:
Rep. Michele Bachmann told Tea Party activists on Wednesday to "take the town halls to Washington, DC" to defeat the health care bill. Bachmann suggested that passing the health reform bill would be a slam against freedom — and the troops in Afghanistan...
..."The men and women today who are bleeding for us in Afghanistan," she said. "We need to think about them, what they gave to us, and recognize if this goes down in the United States, where does anyone go for freedom? Where do we go for freedom?"
(CONTINUED)
"We the people are going to roll them out," said Bachmann, "and when we roll them out we’re going to roll this bill back... Now is the time to see the whites of their eyes."
Birkey has the video, from the Washington Independent.
http://minnesotaindependent.com/...
Birkey thinks the money quote is Bachmann's invocation of "the whites of their eyes," the revolutionary call not to shoot your opponents until they get real, real close. (Bachmann's done a lot of bloodthirsty imagery this year.)
Me, I think the heart this story is the logic of claiming that "supporting the Democratic health care bill equals a betrayal of our troops in Afghanistan."
A close second is Bachmann's suggestion that if this bill goes through, there won't be any freedom left anywhere in the world (Britain, France, Canada, and Germany et al. are too socialist for her taste to be called "free.")
She's said stuff like that before, long before HCR became the top priority of the Obama administration. She's told conservatives we're in the grip of "gangster government" and that there are no other bastions of freedom left in the world if Barack Obama (who is "practicing tyranny" according to Bachmann) isn't stopped. So that's why she's urging supporters to look "for the whites of their eyes."