Craziness, MIchele Bachmann, and the Muslim Brotherhood

Dear Madame L,

I heard that Rep. Michele Bachmann has accused Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of having ties with the Muslim Brotherhood because her close assistant, Huma Abedin, is Saudi by birth.

Does Ms. Bachmann realize that not everyone who's a Muslim is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood? 

Sincerely,

Who's Crazy Now?

Dear Crazy,

Perhaps you and Madame L and most of the educated, thinking, reasoning world are crazy not to make the connections Rep. Bachmann and other crazies keep making.

Here's what CNN's Anderson Cooper had to say about Rep. Bachmann's ridiculous statements.

Here's the truth: Huma Abedin is NOT a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Hello, Michele. 

In fact, she's an American citizen, born to a Saudi father and Pakistani mother in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She's a Muslim, which means she believes in the same God ("Allah" in Arabic) that Christians and Jews believe in. She's married to a Jewish New Yorker and has stuck with him even though he's a foolish philanderer. And Secretary Clinton is a reasonable and experienced and world-traveled person who has employed Ms. Abedin for her intelligence and hard work and cultural sensitivity and maybe even her ability to speak Arabic.  

As Cooper said, "So that's how many degrees of separation Bachmann's claim is based on. Huma Abedin's deceased father, who started an organization decades ago, had the support of a guy who had another organization that might have had the support of another organization, the Muslim Brotherhood. And because of that, Huma Abedin might be some sort of spy or infiltrator and deserves to be investigated."

(Of course the crazies have answers to that, too. To read about them, follow the link in this article. Madame L  is so tired of this nonsense that she's not going to repeat it here.)

Rep. Bachmann and company get their so-called "information" from a website run by a crazy conspiracy theorist who says the God of Islam is "less" than the God of Christianity. Again, Madame L is not going to go into more details and this time won't even provide the link. As if.

Because here's the rub: Because of these statements by Rep. Bachmann and her idiot friends, some Egyptian idiots now believe that the U.S. government must have been responsible for the election of Mohammed Moursi, of the Muslim Brotherhood, as president of Egypt. 

So they did the crazy thing, the Egyptian equivalent of Michele Bachmann making a statement on TV: they threw tomatoes and shoes and other objects at Secretary Clinton's car as she left the U.S. Consulate in Alexandria yesterday.

This means that Michele Bachmann has achieved her immediate goal of getting some attention, which she'd been lacking in recent months, and her mid-term goal of poking sticks at the Obama administration, AND her long-term goal of turning people against the U.S. government.

As Jason Linkins wrote at Huffington Post, "[I]f the Muslim Brotherhood wanted to infiltrate Congress, why wouldn't they do it the way everyone else does -- cut huge campaign checks and get their lobbyists to offer legislators lavish rewards for writing legislation?"

Hey, maybe Michele Bachmann has another goal the rest of us hadn't thought of yet: simply pulling in more money from conservative crazies, to keep herself in Congress. 

Oh, perish the thought,

Madame L