DOCTOR
NOT A DOCTOR
Mother Jones‘ Tim Murphy reports that for years the crazy-eyed, Republican presidential candidate referred to herself as “Dr. Michele Bachmann.” Murphy reports:
When Bachmann knocked off incumbent GOP state Sen. Gary Laidig at the district nominating convention, the MREC fired off a news release repeatedly invoking their candidate’s honorarium. “On the first ballot, Dr. Michele Bachmann was endorsed 62% to Laidig’s 38%,” it read. “Dr. Bachmann herself, who arrived at her convention with no intention of running, was shocked by her victory.” (The narrative, promoted by the congresswoman, that she was an unlikely candidate is false—Bachmann had announced her candidacy months earlier and laid the groundwork for the upset by stacking the convention with anti-Profile activists.)
“Dr. Bachmann” might have given the activist a bit more gravitas, but it was not an appropriate title. Bachmann received a J.D.—the standard law school degree—from Oral Roberts University, and an LL.M. in tax law from William & Mary in 1988. The LL.M. does count as a postdoctoral degree, as Bachmann says, because it came after she had received a “terminal degree”—that is, a degree that can’t be directly improved upon. But while J.D. (juris doctor) has the word “doctor” in it, it is not accepted practice for J.D.’s to refer to themselves as “Dr.”
Envisioning: Doctor Bachmann up to her eyeballs in guts, eyes flapping wildly, her birdlike arms shaking, flailing a cranial saw about as she performs an anterior temporal lobectomy, carefully removing lobe tissue from the lateral temporal cortex, barking orders: “I need Ten cc’s of Gabapentin. Give me 5 cc’s of Zonisamide. Articulator. Cottle Cartilage Crusher, STAT! I said the Epilation Forceps!! Not the Kelly Retractor! STAT!, STAT STAT STAT STAT”. Ha. Yeah.
No, Michele Bachmann is not a doctor. She is a tax attorney, who moonlighted as a crackpot culture warrior, railing against a MN state education curriculum standard (see, it was leading the nation toward a pantheistic, pro-abortion, one-world society and God forbid education should make any forays – with its insidious, communistic/satanic tentacles – into the grand exceptionalism of the US of A.). She home-schooled her kids, but that didn’t stop her from running for a seat on a MN school board (she lost). More recently, the Oral Roberts U alum refused to rise to a teenager’s challenge to a civics debate. Rather than joining the girl in a time honored, fair and fun battle of intellects, she sicked her Godly supporters on the teen bookworm who did what they do best – deluged her with death threats. Primum non nocere.
MRS. Bachmann. My mom is a doctor. My mom was one of 5% of women to enter medical school in the 1950’s. My mom worked her way through medical school by working as a nurse, because before she could go to medical school, she had to go to nursing school so that she could go to medical school. And before that, she went to college (not Bible, regular). Only after all this “goin’ to school” stuff – 16 years of tertiary education, snippings and dissections, residencies and accreditations and taking of Oaths you could never take – did she earn the right to call herself a “doctor”. So, Senator, I know about doctors. I was raised by a doctor. A doctor screamed at me to clean my room. Senator, you are no doctor.