Posted on 09/15/2011 6:50:18 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
On Wednesday night, Anderson Cooper took some time to address how Michele Bachmann‘s recent comment about the danger of the HPV vaccine — relaying a story about a Tampa woman who supposedly shared that her daughter had developed mental retardation following the vaccination — fits in with other misleading and incorrect comments she had made in the recent past.
Said Cooper:
Now it’s certainly not a new phenomenon for politicians to stretch the truth and manipulate facts. But Bachmann is spreading an all-out falsehood here — a dangerous falsehood at that. It’s not the first time she’s done this by any stretch of the imagination.
He then played various clips of Bachmann making inaccurate statements — such as that President Barack Obama had traveled on a taxpayer-funded, $200 million-a-day trip India with 2,000 people and that he’d released all the oil from strategic reserves — and misleading statements, like the “observation” that swine flu broke out in the 1970s under a Democratic president as well.
So. Do voters care about the truth? Does the fact that Bachmann has slipped in the polls recently have anything to do with these type of statements? To answer these questions, Cooper brought on Bachmann’s former Chief of Staff, Ron Carey, who offered a fairly fascinating theory for why Bachmann has a tendency to share and perpetuate erroneous statements:
Well, Michele is very impulsive from a personality standpoint and, to her credit, she reads an awful lot of information, but sometimes I’m afraid that she reads maybe 80 or 90 percent and leaves out or forgets the ten or 20 percent that can change the outcome, so her impulsive nature coupled with the fact that she sometimes doesn’t digest information as carefully as she should leads to these kinds of impulsive statements that sometimes are just off the mark enough that it makes her into more of a provocative, controversial figure.
He continued:
One of the challenges I’ve found with working with Michele, and it’s consistent with other people who have worked with her, is the fact that she doesn’t use her staff well. She’s pretty much independent and does her own research. She’ll be out there on the stump, preparing her remarks and speaking off the cuff with no staff intervention or involvement whatsoever, so it’s really difficult to prep her and help her kind of back-check before she goes out speaking because she will be out there speaking and you’ll say, “Where did this come from?” and it’s something that she maybe heard on TV.
CNN political analyst David Gergen then shared his theory on what her statements have to do with her views on science.
Take a look, via CNN:
Terrible of Bachmann to spout the mental retardation line. Lost a lot of respect for her.
It’s weird that these handlers assume that a candidate with a mind of his/her own, who doesn’t have the good sense to depend on a handler, is “impulsive.”
Despise Anderson Cooper.
Without attribution, she’s in the same league as NBC news...
Flaming sexism.
Flaming sexism from a leftist news source.
Anderson Cooper is scum.
Looks like Michelle is getting press. Misstatements and half-truths have served Barry well. Maybe she can jump to the lead by sorta accusing other candidates of crimes.
Something like this coming from a former member of her staff combined with a CNN talking head moron added to a record that mac daddy that he can not run on and you have another round of unapproval statements.
This current administration has NOTHING to run on, NOTHING to show for the money they wasted, and NO plans to correct ANYTHING except more of the same—— WASTE MONEY, WASTE MONEY AND WASTE MONEY.
How things have changed in our risk averse society. Our ancestors died from horrible diseases such as smallpox and bubonic plague, and sometimes ended-up in iron lungs from polio. They would have welcomed the vaccinations that Michelle Bachmann and the internet fear mongers find so risky.
This statement right here makes me wonder just what Carey is up to. A former staffer goes on national TV and complains his former boss didn't use her staff well. His observations about Bachmann's impulsiveness may or may not be correct. But he definitely raises the specter of his own bias with that comment.
At least there is a face and a name associated with the comment and it is not from some unrevealed former staffer, so we can at least vet it.
‘Impulsive Nature’ : Is that a synonym for “loose canon”?
A) The guy is responding to leading questions from Cooper, and b) he’s marketing himself. What would anyone expect him to say?
...and in the closet.
Being the President carries a monumental weight to get things right (present company excepted) to prevent being misleading and requireing careful consideration to what is spoken. Agree?
So you think its a positive attribute for Bachmann to speak impulsively from dubious sources of information? A free-spirit this surely makes, but not something very presidential.
There is no arguement that she is conservative. My concern is that she sometimes is too close to the irrationality of ronpaul AND WHAT’S WORSE doesn’t seem to care.
Bachmann would much better serve America as the Senator from Minnesota, we just do not need “impulsiveness” with the power of the Presidency
I liked Bachmann and don’t like Anderson Cooper, but her mental retardation statement is something you would expect from trailer park trash who watches daytime tv or John Edwards.
That comment said a lot about her fitness for office.
I would in a heartbeat.
“I liked Bachmann and don’t like Anderson Cooper, but her mental retardation statement is something you would expect from trailer park trash who watches daytime tv or John Edwards.”
John Edwards the presidential candidate or you mean the psychic? I’d say the psychic but there’s no ‘s’ in his name.
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