In the United States, the stab-in-the-back has become a staple right-wing explanation for lost wars. During the McCarthy era, conservatives blamed the Harry Truman administration for “losing” China to communism during the Chinese Civil War in 1949, and then failing to secure victory in Korea. After the Vietnam War ended in defeat for the United States in 1975, Richard Nixon impugned liberals, the media, Congress, and anti-war demonstrators for failing to back Saigon. Even the movie hero Rambo got in on the act: “Sir, do we get to win this time?”

In the wake of the Iraq War, the stab-in-the-back myth has resurfaced. This time, conservatives place the blame squarely on President Obama. As the story goes, George W. Bush’s “surge” of American troops in Iraq achieved a victory, before Obama fecklessly withdrew U.S. soldiers, transforming success into failure and triggering the rise of ISIS.

Senator Lindsey Graham said, “When it comes to blaming people about Iraq, the person I blame is Barack Obama, not George W. Bush.” Jeb Bush said the president retreated from Iraq in “blind haste” and concluded: “Rushing away from danger can be every bit as unwise as rushing into danger, and the costs have been grievous.” The conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer claimed that the Iraq War had been “won,” only for the victory to be “tossed away” by the president.

Like many myths, the stab-in-the-back combines an ounce of truth with a pound of exaggeration. In 1918, German sailors mutinied and the country collapsed in revolution, giving the superficial appearance of a military betrayed at home. But the war effort was already lost, as newly arriving American forces overwhelmed German troops. In 1975, the American will to fight in Vietnam had indeed eroded. But no victory was possible. By that point, the United States had lost nearly 60,000 soldiers in a campaign to prop up an illegitimate regime in Saigon. How would pouring even more resources into the Asian sinkhole serve American interests? ...

Cadets in the Imperial Japanese Army, circa 1934.

There are good reasons to bring Japan into the gun control debate in the United States: the relative success of firearms regulation in Japan, the recent rise of gun violence connected to organized crime, the history of weapons-carrying elites, etc. But WWII had nothing whatsoever to do with gun rights, gun control, or the 2nd Amendment.

Why bring this up? Because of Ed Emery, Republican representative to the Missouri state legislature from Lamar, MO. In a video produced last April, Rep. Emery said:

We know in a historical context that Japan was considering an invasion on the land mass of the United States of America, but they were afraid to, and the reason they were afraid to [is] because they knew that every American is armed. And although they were not afraid of our armies, they were afraid of our citizens.

Randy Turner, who posted the video recently, says that “That ridiculous story has been circulating for decades”, but this is the first I’ve heard of it. As Turner says, “No reputable historian takes it seriously.”

I’m not a specialist on Japanese military history, but there are a few points that are worth making. Japan did attack American territory directly, both in Hawaii and in the Aleutians, and had substantial plans for occupying Hawaii if a second opportunity for assault presented itself. Japan also attacked the US mainland, or “land mass,” with sea-based and balloon bomb attacks.

More importantly, attacking the U.S. mainland wouldn’t have advanced the primary, or even secondary, strategic aims of the Japanese military in WWII, and wouldn’t have been seriously considered until after more important goals were met. Japan’s primary goal in WWII, remember, was defeating Chinese resistance to Japanese control so as to establish a stable, secure colonial foothold on the Asian continent. In order to maintain military production, Japan needed reliable sources of metals, minerals, oil, and rubber, materials that the United States had stopped selling Japan as part of the attempt to get Japan to back away from China. The attack on Pearl Harbor and the Aleutian island chain was a bit of a feint, to damage US military capacity in the Pacific and to blunt any response to Japanese seizure of the Philippines, Dutch East Indies, and other territories in the South Pacific. Those territories were valuable to Japan for their mineral wealth, oil and rubber: exploiting those resources would allow Japan to continue fighting the war in China.

Needless to say, any greater ambitions Japan had about Pacific domination were cut down by the loss of carrier groups at Midway and Coral Sea, which meant that Japan’s ability to project military might across the ocean was drastically reduced. At no time after that was there any serious discussion of “taking the fight to America.”

As far as fearing the well-armed American populace, instead of the American military, it’s hard to believe that the Japanese military would have treated them differently than the Chinese, who waged both large-force and guerilla-style operations against Japanese forces with great vigor and frequency. I don’t know what the distribution of guns was like in China before and during the Japanese invasion, but remember that China had been through twenty years of warlordism and civil war before the 1937 outbreak of hostilities, so there were certainly plenty of modern weapons and military veterans in the population.

Barack Obama, in what was surely neither the first nor the last time in his political career, invoked Abraham Lincoln in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. "While I'm proud of what we've achieved together, I'm far more mindful of my own failings, knowing exactly what Lincoln meant when he said, 'I have been driven to my knees many times by the overwhelming conviction that I had no place else to go.'"

The only problem is that there's no firm documentation that Lincoln said the quote. It was attributed to him by a reporter in 1865, but there's a long track record of Lincoln's final year being distorted by eyewitnesses. James M. Cornelius, curator of the Lincoln Collection at the Lincoln presidential library in Springfield, Illinois, wrote in the Daily Beast that Lincoln only ever uttered the word "knees" (the plural) four times in his entire public career, and there is absolutely no record of him ever saying the singular "knee."

Still, considering the fact that so many of Lincoln's pithiest one-liners are off-hand comments that are poorly sourced ("The Lord prefers common-looking people -- that is why he made so many of them" springs to mind; he made the remark to his secretary John Hay, where it appeared in Hay's memoir in 1890), and that political speechwriting is decidedly not the same as a PhD dissertation, Barack Obama's Lincoln misquote gets One Bachmann.

To be fair to Clark, she made her remarks while appearing in the "Better Know a District" segment on Comedy Central's Colbert Report, which gleefully skewers representatives and tries to coax them into saying absurdities (in the past, host Stephen Colbert prodded former Florida representative Robert Wexler, who was running unopposed for re-election, into saying "I enjoy cocaine because it's a fun thing to do") but the sheer factual incorrectness of her statement still boggles the mind.

Asked by Colbert what she would say to Brooklynites to change if she could go back in time to 1898 (starts at 3:04 in the video), the year Brooklyn was incorporated into New York City, she responded:

Clarke: Slavery.

Colbert: Slavery. Really? I didn’t realize there was slavery in Brooklyn in 1898.

Clarke: I’m pretty sure there was.

Colbert: It sounds like a horrible part of the United States that kept slavery going until 1898. Who would be enslaving you in 1898 in New York?

Clarke: The Dutch.

Clarke's office claims the exchange was a joke -- if it wasn't, it does beg the question of exactly who she thinks that bearded guy on the penny and the five-dollar bill is.

The Dutch, incidentally, did introduce slavery to New Amsterdam in 1626, a practice continued by the British when they annexed the city in 1664. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, over three-fifths of the population of New York were slaves. Slavery was, in fact, legal in the state of New York until 1827, when it was finally abolished. Slavery was illegalized on a nation scale, of course, with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, after a long and bloody civil war.

So how many Bachmanns does Rep. Clark get? The fact that her gaffe serves as a reminder that slavery was a Northern practice as well as a Southern one almost took it down to four Bachmanns, but the sheer obliviousness to one of the major events of American history -- the Civil War and emancipation -- brings it up to a full Five Bachmanns.

1 Bachmann: An honest misstatement, like saying the Civil War started in 1961.

2 Bachmanns: A more serious misstatement, but relatively minor, like getting the dates for the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence mixed up.

3 Bachmanns: Real confusion over history, like saying FDR was president at the start of the Great Depression, but which doesn't challenge conventional historical wisdom.

4 Bachmanns: A genuine display of historical ignorance, but which has a kernel of truth. Saying the Founding Fathers worked tirelessly to end slavery is an example -- not true of most Founders, but some, like John Jay, did.

5 Bachmanns: A display of historical ignorance so mind-blowing, viewer discretion is advised. Claiming Hitler survived World War II or the French were enemies of the U.S. in the Revolution are examples.