Michele Bachmann's Letter to the Attorney General

Sometimes what you hear once is not what you hear a second time. Last evening on CNN, Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann was defending a letter she had written to the US Attorney General asking for a full investigation of the extent to which the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated the American federal government, citing the assistant to Secretary Hillary Clinton as an example.
She was later the topic of debate on the Anderson Cooper hour on CNN, during which Cooper talked to the president of an American Muslim group and several others about the "worrisome" nature of Bachmann’s charges. They seemed so sure that she is dead wrong that they didn’t bother to have anyone on to balance the Cooper-Muslim viewpoint - not even Bachmann herself.
Then, it all disappeared. Nothing on CNN today. Nothing on any other TV network. Nothing in the newspapers. Nothing on European TV or other media outlets. Nothing on the Internet. At least nothing I can find.
Yet I know what I saw and heard yesterday.
I know because my first reaction was, oh no, not another McCarthy-style purge. The background facts are similar.
In 1950, Wisconsin US Senator Joe McCarthy, who had been rabble-rousing against the federal government for a decade, finally got his platform in the guise of a Senate committee with the power to subpoena. It was the beginning of the notorious witch hunt for Communists in the midst of the American fabric. The appeal of McCarthy seemed to be his positive conviction that he was right and that he would rid America of the perceived danger within.
He ruined a lot of lives during his four-year assault, and it finally took the combination of President Eisenhower and Edward R. Murrow to eliminate him and the witch hunt he started.
But, to be fair, if anyone would even want to be when it comes to Joe McCarthy, it was the early 1950s. The Second World War had been won only to be “lost” to the Iron Curtain that Stalin dropped over Eastern Europe with the promise to take over the world. America was frightened and unsure what to do. Her defenses were focused on Korea and any spare time for McCarthy and the Communists within was scant.
But the fear was real.
Cut to Congresswoman Bachmann. Her letter to the Attorney General calls for a full investigation of the extent to which the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated the US federal government. This on first blush sounds a lot like a 1950s style witch hunt over what is terrifying America now - the radical Islam terrorist threat to destroy America and her allies.
Does Bachmann know or suspect anything that could be the basis for an Attorney General investigation? And, would the Obama Attorney General do it in any case. And, will anyone now in the Obama administration who might be able to help pay any attention before the November presidential election?
Or is this just Michele Bachmann going off on another rant from the far right, meant to frighten and provoke Americans to become even more terrified of foreigners and Muslims?
Who knows.
And, the fact that both these extreme ideas about “purging” areas of the government come from the northern Midwest of America is also something to consider. I’ll leave that to historians, but it might be that there is something conspiratorial in the collective genes of this region that doesn’t really appear elsewhere in the United States.
But, what worries me most is that the topic has simply disappeared into thin air. Was Bachmann muzzled? I doubt anyone could accomplish that, but, hey, she’s running for re-election and candidates are subject to all sorts of pressure, especially monetary.
Or has the media simply decided to close the file, even if the public would benefit from hearing a little more before deciding?
I didn’t even see anything on Newsmax today. Strange at best.