I am fairly conversant in the history of presidential campaigning and cannot recall an era, let along a larger number of candidates, that believe that telling lie and after lie will get them elected. Exhibit A in this regard is Michele Bachmann, whose stock has most fortunately fallen as fast as Rick Perry’s has risen.
Call them lies, obfuscations, fibs or whatever, but Bachmann is proved herself to be pathologically incapable of being honest, or at least doing us the courtesy of checking her facts before she steps up to a microphone and begins blathering.
That is no more evident than her claim during a debate last week and in interviews afterwards that Gardasil, a vaccine to prevent HPV, a sexually transmitted infection that can cause cervical cancer, is “dangerous.” Never mind the controversy over whether young women should be required to take Gardasil, a drug created by Merck as a profit center. The vaccine has proven to be safe in the vast majority of cases and is indisputably a life saver.
Bachmann soon backtracked and acknowledged in the face of outrage from doctors and public health officials and she was not a doctor or a scientists. The damage had already been done.
As it is, Gardasil use is low, which probably is a result of fears over vaccines in general following claims by researchers, later proven to be false, that certain vaccines cause autism.
As incredible as it seems, Bachmann’s assertion that the vaccine was dangerous was based on what a distraught women told her after another president debate in which she attacked Perry for ordering the vaccine to be given to school-age girls in Texas.
And we would trust her with the Nuclear Football?