Michele Bachmann’s comment on the killing of bin Laden, via the Des Moines Register:
Tonight’s news does not bring back the lives of the thousands of innocent people who were killed that day by Osama bin Laden’s horrific plan, and it does not end the threat posed by terrorists, but it is my hope that this is the beginning of the end of Sharia-compliant terrorism.
Of course there is such a thing as shari’ah-compliant finance, which is an actual, accepted method of conducting financial transactions. Shari’ah-compliant terrorism exists only in the fevered Republican imagination. Bachmann’s comment — from a prepared statement, mind you, not a spontaneous gaffe — exhibits the conflating sleight-of-hand so frequently used by the shari’ah scare-mongers.
Bachmann and her fellow Gaffney-ites aim make their followers believe they ought not just be afraid of terrorism, but of this murky, foreign thing called shari’ah, a thing they don’t understand, but which they nonetheless use to mean anything from Muslims are scary to terrorism is sanctioned by Islam to Islam is incompatible with the Constitution.
If efforts circa 2004-2008 to portray Democrats as “soft-on-terror” are rendered unusable now, “shari’ah-compliant” [fill in the blank] will be the all-purpose, 2012 version.
