It’s Not Revisionism If You are Ignorant

Now, some will call Michelle Bachmann’s unfortunate commentary to a group of Iowa conservatives awhile ago historical revisionism. That according to her claim, slavery was a bane on the national existence from the get go, and that the Founding Fathers worked tirelessly to rid this country of the horrible scourge called slavery.

And they eventually did, she says.

Forgetting, of course, about the central issue that brought about the Civil War and the deaths of 620,000 Union and Confederate soldiers and the wounding of almost 400,000 more. John Quincy Adams, as as he was, did not oversee the dismantling of slavery in America. That fell to Abraham Lincoln and the hundreds of thousands who died in the Civil War.

The only reason I bring this up is that this is the very person who will deliver the Teabagger version of the State of the Union Address Rebuttal this evening.

As I said in the beginning, some would call this historical revisionism. But this goes beyond all boundaries of that very legitimate pursuit in historical analysis.

It isn’t revisionism when the revisionist is an ignoramus.