Bachmann takes her information from strangers

From the MSNBC site, September 13 (you can see the Today Show interview here):

TAMPA, FL—During an appearance on the “TODAY” Show this morning, GOP candidate Michele Bachmann told NBC’s Matt Lauer that a woman approached her following the GOP debate last night to recount a story of an HPV shot gone wrong.

“I had a mother last night come up to me here in Tampa, Florida, after the debate,” Bachmann said. “She told me that her little daughter took that vaccine, that injection [Gardasil], and she suffered from mental retardation thereafter.

“The mother was crying,” Bachmann added. “I didn’t know who she was before the debate.”

Bachmann is a candidate for President of the United States. She is supposed to be a serious person. Yet she repeats something told to her by a total stranger about a medical/scientific subject as though it were true. Shouldn’t she have found out if there were documented cases of Gardasil causing mental retardation before she went national with it? Is it Bachmann’s habit to believe and repeat everything she is told? My doubts that she has the intelligence and judgment to be a viable presidential nominee and president have just increased.

If Bachmann were president, would she say in a State of the Union address, “I had a man come up to me during my visit to Tampa yesterday who said he was a former al Qaeda agent, and he told me that al Qaeda has smuggled 24 nuclear bombs across the Mexican border into the U.S.”?

UPDATE: The American Pediatric Association has issued a statement saying there is no evidence that the HPV vaccine can cause mental retardation.

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Gintas writes:

What it sounds like is that Bachmann just isn’t hard enough to do the job. In this case her reaction is primarily emotional. Maybe it’s all geared for women voters.

I bet Laura Wood would agree that women, the emotional creatures they are (God bless ‘em), just aren’t suited for the political world. To thrive in that world they need to harden themselves, which makes them less feminine. There are hard women in politics, and it’s an ugly sight. Lady MacBeth is the prototype:

Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood…

Alexis Zarkov writes:

This looks very bad for Bachmann. This HPV controversy reminds me of the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine bogus connection to autism. Many parents of autistic children believed MMR caused their children to become autistic. The myth got a boost when a 1998 article in Lancet seemed to confirm what parents suspected. But that article was a complete hoax. The author had a conflict of interest and was found guilty of serious professional misconduct and removed from the British medical registry, meaning he can no longer practice medicine. Nevertheless many parents continue to believe MMR causes autism, and no amount of scientific evidence to the contrary can convince them. When parents face this kind of tragedy their imaginations run wild and they have lock on to something. At one time it was demons, today it’s vaccines. Bachmann should have enough cultural literacy to know that people fall prey to this kind of magical thinking. This and other incidents lead me to believe she’s unfit even for being a representative, let alone president.

Are women suited for the political world? On the whole, I would say No. However there are exceptions, Margret Thatcher being a prominent example. I’ll judge each person on his merits regardless of sex. On the merits, Bachmann fails.

September 16

LA writes:

When I first discussed Bachmann’s impending candidacy last spring, I expressed both my doubts about her abilities and my hopes that she would improve. In fact I softened my real thoughts because I didn’t want to sound overly negative about her. What I thought, but didn’t say at the time, was that she had a robotic quality. Subsequently I saw interviews of her in which she seemed more intelligent and in command and less robotic, and I felt better about her candidacy, though I still kept repeating my doubts about her abilities and said that if she was to be viable, she had to show herself as a leader, not just as a list of conservative positions.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 15, 2011 01:10 PM | Send