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Friday, Sep 14, 2012 8:38 PM UTC

Bachmann claims vindicatation

The congresswoman says unrest in the Middle East validates her anti-Muslim campaign

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Topics: Libya embassy attack, Michele Bachmann, Middle East,

Bachmann claims vindicatationMitt Romney and Michele Bachmann at a campaign stop in Portsmouth, Va. March 3. (Credit: AP)

Rep. Michele Bachmann stood vindicated, at least in her mind, before a friendly crowd at the Values Voter Summit in Washington today, pointing to the current unrest in the Middle East as ex-post-facto justification for the witch hunt she led against Muslims in the U.S government earlier this summer.

“This week, as we have seen to our horror, there is a very real war that is going on across the world,” Bachmann said.

As Mitt Romney’s response to the Libyan crisis demonstrates, the entire Republican Party had moved to the right on the issue of radical Islam, and as Bachmann sees it, she saw this coming all along.

“When members of Congress, myself included, started to ask questions about the identities of who these people were who were leading this purge in our government and what it was they were purging from our training materials, the Obama administration told us the information was closed; it was classified; we couldn’t know who was behind this. I’m here to say, my friends, that we’re now today very late in the game.  We’re quickly losing our sense of who we are as a nation, and we’re losing our ability to identify our radical Islamist enemy,” she said.

Fellow Republicans condemned Bachmann when, along with four other colleagues, she sent letters to the inspectors general of five federal agencies involved in national security demanding they look into alleged connections to the Muslim Brotherhood of Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin and others.

The rest of Bachmann’s speech, as TPM’s Evan McMorris-Santoro noted, was “a master class in conservative fears about President Obama and Islam.” “It is my belief and my opinion that Barack Obama has been the most dangerous president we have ever had on American foreign policy,” she said.

Indeed, Bachmann has been way out in front of her party in fighting her paranoid spectral version of radical Islam, something that earned her the praise of Bryan Fischer, the far-right American Family Association radio host: “I think Michele Bachmann understands it. … I think Islam represents the single greatest threat to our security and liberty, and we ignore that threat to our peril. So we need political leaders that are aware of that threat, who will stop calling Islam a religion of peace … I don’t think that anybody in the Republican Party leadership understands the threat that Islam poses to the West.”

 

Alex Seitz-Wald

Alex Seitz-Wald is Salon's political reporter. Email him at aseitz-wald@salon.com, and follow him on Twitter @aseitzwald. More Alex Seitz-Wald.

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