I haven’t seen anyone write about this yet. Michele Bachmann was asked about Libya during an interview with the American Family Association’s Bryan Fischer last week.
Fischer: …I have a more fundamental problem, that he took this action without getting authorization from Congress as the Constitution specifies. Your reaction?
Bachmann: Well that’s right, and it’s ironic that President Obama, when he was running for [the] presidency of the United States, was taking President Bush to task for doing that in Iraq. Now, President Bush subsequently went to Congress and asked for authorization, but he went there first without asking for authorization. So President Obama essentially has done the same thing.
As you’d hope any sitting member of Congress could recognize, this is simply false. President Bush received Congressional authorization for military action in Iraq in October 2002, several months before the war began.
This should not be reduced to a mere “gaffe.” Her remarks reflect a serious misunderstanding of recent history. On a basic, factual level, Bachmann made incorrect assertions about the procedural run-up to the Iraq war, and then premised her critique of the Libya intervention on those assertions.
Above all else, I find this depressing.