Profiles in Ignorance: How America's Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber

by Andy Borowitz

Bachmann’s persistent confusion about names, dates, and places sometimes made you wonder if she’d accidentally downloaded a malicious version of Google. If elected president, she vowed, the U.S. would not have an embassy in Iran—not hard to accomplish, since it hadn’t had one since Jimmy Carter’s presidency. Speaking of Carter, she invoked his name while linking Obama to the 2009 swine flu epidemic: “I find it interesting that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat president, Jimmy Carter. And I’m not blaming this on President Obama; I just think it’s an interesting coincidence.” It would have been an interesting coincidence, except that the epidemic she was referring to happened under a Republican, Gerald Ford. She warned of “the rise of the Soviet Union” in 2011, two decades after it fell. Blasting Obama once more, she said that he “put us in Libya. He is now putting us in Africa,” seemingly unaware that, by putting us in Libya, he had already put us in Africa.