I had planned to write about this last week. But something else got my attention instead. And I figured that everybody concerned would just quietly move on to less embarrassing behavior.

But I obviously sold Michele Bachmann short. The mistake I made was not so much ascribing remotely rational behavior to her, but assuming that she had friends who were capable of at least intermittent rationality, and who cared about how much she was embarrassing herself (and the great state of Minnesota, to boot) on the national stage.

It all started innocuously enough, with Bachmann failing to understand the meaning of the term “international reserve currency”, when the governor of China’s central bank urged the International Monetary Fund last week to create a new international reserve currency to replace the dollar.

Since Bachmann has presumably heard of Wikipedia, which would have handily explained the meaning to her, the problem was not so much that she didn’t understand the term, but rather that she didn’t understand that she didn’t understand it.

Because Bachmann is who she is (or do I mean what she is?), she had gone ahead and ascribed a meaning to the phrase. First, she decided to replace the phrase she didn’t understand with a similar sounding one that she did understand: “international currency”. What could go wrong by leaving out just one single word? (Something I grew used to hearing from undergraduate students in a previous life; my usual response was to ask them to ponder the phrase “Not guilty, your honor!”)

And then she decided that “international currency” didn’t mean a currency that was accepted in many different parts of the globe, but a currency that was legal tender anywhere in the world. So she stripped away both adjectives from “international reserve currency” and boiled it down to just the noun, “currency”.

Which obviously meant that China had just declared Economic World War 1 on us by asking the IMF to force the U.S. to kill the dollar and replace it with some nefarious international currency (that presumably China would control). And even if everyone else was too preoccupied with petty things, Michele Bachmann wasn’t going to just ignore this economic Pearl Harbor attack.

She stepped right up, and right away too, forcing Treasury Secretary Timothy “Hapless” Geithner and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke to pledge to defend our economic borders:

We’ve seen both China, Russia, Kazahistan make calls for an international monetary conversion to an international monetary standard as soon as the G20. And I’m wondering, would you categorically renounce the United States moving away from the dollar and going to a global currency as suggested this morning by China and also by Russia. Mr. Secretary?

For the record, they both did so renounce. (Just in passing, both China, Russia, Kazahistan? And Kazahistan? But that’s Bachmann for you.)

I like to believe that if Bachmann hadn’t set this lunatic ball rolling then a lot of other people who really should have known much better wouldn’t have gone on to embarrass themselves too, but that’s probably my Pollyanna side showing.

Because, the next thing we knew, Fox News‘s Major Garrett had enlisted as a footsoldier (helpful clarification: Major is his name, not his rank) in Economic World War 1, and fired this salvo at President Obama:

Taking this economic debate a bit globally, senior Chinese officials have publicly expressed an interest in international currency. This is described by Chinese specialists as a sign that they are less confident than they used to be in the value and the reliability of the U.S. dollar.

When Obama proved somewhat non-responsive, swift came the crisp follow-up that brooked no evasion:

QUESTION: Is there a need –

PRESIDENT OBAMA: That will just strengthen — excuse me?

QUESTION: Is there a need for a global currency?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: I don’t believe that there’s a need for a global currency.

It was reassuring to have Obama publicly committed to opposing China’s offensive, but no true economic patriot could just let it go at that. So Bachmann took the obvious next step. She introduced legislation “that would bar the dollar from being replaced by any foreign currency.” Not just any old legislation, but a constitutional amendment:

Although Title 31, Sec. 5103 USC prohibits foreign currency from being recognized in the U.S., the President has the power to engage foreign governments in treaties, and the President is principally responsible for the interpretations and implementation of those treaties according to the Constitution. As a result, legislation prohibiting the President and Treasury from issuing or agreeing that the U.S. will adopt an international currency would need to come in the form of a Constitutional Amendment differentiating a treaty used to implement an international currency in the U.S. from other types of treaty agreements.

And she took to the airwaves to explain what this fight was all about:

We are at the point, Sean, of revolution. And by that, what I mean, an orderly revolution — where the people of this country wake up get up and make a decision that this is not going to happen on their watch. …

If Tim Geithner is successful under President Obama, and they move us to an international currency, then we have no hope of standing on our own as a sovereign nation with our own economic system. It’s over. We can’t do that.

Bachmann may or may not have many friends, but she sure knows how to influence people. (If living creatures who superficially resemble human beings but have mush for brains can be called people, that is.) Thirty Republicans have signed on as co-sponsors for her constitutional amendment bill.

So all of these people have managed to miss the point that absolutely nobody has suggested for one single minute that some international currency should replace the dollar as legal tender in the United States? That the proposal was for a new reserve currency, defined thusly:

A reserve currency (or anchor currency) is a currency which is held in significant quantities by many governments and institutions as part of their foreign exchange reserves. It also tends to be the international pricing currency for products traded on a global market, such as oil, gold, etc.

And there’s nobody in the Republican party who can take Bachmann or any of her thirty co-sponsors aside, and explain this to them in words of two syllables or less?