The "Whacko-Bird" Wisdom of Michele Bachmann

by Sunnyjane

Warning: Medical science experts have not ruled out the possibility that lunacy is transmitted via the Internet.  Too much of the Tea Party may make you go nuts.

If it wouldn't do permanent damage, it might be interesting to spend two minutes inside Michele Bachmann's brain.  

Like an eighth-grader's dubious lab experiment gone really bad, the never-gonna-be-president House rep from Minnesota's 2012 campaign started out improbable and ended up preposterous.  Her entire campaign centered around social issues because when forced to enter into real policy issues, she almost made Sarah Palin sound rational.  Of course, she began her presidential campaign before the 2008 election, taking up the McCain/Palin mantra that Barack Obama doesn't see America as we see America.  And even prior to Tea Party darlings former rep Allen West and current Senator Ted Cruz, Bachmann was channeling her inner McCarthyism and saw anti-Americans (translation: Communists!) behind every pillar and post.  

While she should be treated for insanity, Bachmann's actually being investigated for, um...irregularities in her campaign.  As John Avlon at The Daily Beast reported recently, she is embroiled in a litany of legal proceedings related to her rolling disaster of a presidential campaign -- including an Office of Congressional Ethics investigation into campaign improprieties that has not previously been reported.   But never one to ignore an opportunity to blast President Obama, Glenn Beck has decided that Bachmann is under investigation because she's against radical Islam.

It's little wonder she's being investigated.  Her campaign and office staffing problems have a long history.  In 2011, the Associated Press did a little tally and found that in the four years she had been in the House of Representatives, she had lost six chiefs of staff, five press secretaries, five legislative directors, and three communications directors.  Whew! 

Charles Pierce of Esquire weighed in like this in late March:  Ever since the 2012 Iowa straw poll, when Bachmann stormed to victory by being the candidate best able to bus old white people efficiently from one part of Iowa to another, there have been rumors that, internally, the Bachmann campaign was a five-alarmer in Shanghai, and that was before Ed Rollins, bless his perpetually treacherous heart, began telling anyone within earshot what a freak show he'd signed up with. 

Ed Rollins, of course, signed on with Bachmann's campaign before she even announced her candidacy in June 2011; by September, he quit because he'd had a stroke.  (Well, who wouldn't have had a stroke, huh?)  By the end of October, he was saying, She's out of money and out of ideas.

How History Will Remember Michele Bachmann

Even Texas will not be able to whitewash the Minnesota representative's record for their textbooks.  It's far too outlandish.  We all know that she told folks in New Hampshire how much she loved their state because You're the state where the shot was heard round the world in Lexington and Concord. She was speaking. of course, about the beginning of the Revolutionary War, which actually began at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts.  And she thought slavery was a bad thing, but at least it kept families together, so it was better than their current situation under the Obama Administration.  She also asked attendees at one speech to wish the deceased Elvis Presley, said to be one of her favorite singers, a raucous Happy Birthday! -- on the thirty-fourth anniversary of his death.  And of the President's foreign policies, she huffed that ...he put us in Libya. He is now putting us in Africa.  I have no clue where she thinks Libya is, but she obviously doesn't realize that it is in, uh, Africa.

One of the most tone-deaf, whacko scenarios of her political career had to do with Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee. Steele spoke at CPAC 2009 where he took partial blame for the GOP's loss to Barack Obama the previous November.  Bachmann's turn at the podium was next, and before she began her speech she yelled, Michael Steele, you be da man, you be da man!   No information on exactly what Mr. Steele thought of being cheered in Ebonics by one of Minnesota's state birds, the Common Loon.

Hey, Barack!  Wanna suck on my belly button?

But there may be some instances of how brainless Bachmann is that haven't received as much attention.   Yes, she kissed George W. Bush at her very first State of the Union Address in 2007 and had such a death grip on him for thirty seconds that a reporter for Fox News hilariously told Tucker Carlson, We were about ten seconds away from a Secret Service moment there; you could see those guys talking into their wrists.  Things were going to get ugly.

But in 2008, Bachmann also threatened then-candidate for president, Barack Obama, with similar treatment:  If the presidency would somehow go to Barack Obama, I would welcome him to the 6th District as well ... As a matter of fact, I would put my hand on his shoulder and give him a kiss if he wanted to.  (There is no truth to the scurrilous rumor that Senator Obama muttered, I'd rather eat cold coffee grounds.)

End Note(s)

Marcus recently updated his social media Relationship Status to: It's Complicated

With DOMA and Prop 8 having just been argued before the Supreme Court, it is worthwhile to examine Bachmann's opinion on the subject of gays and lesbians marrying.  Actually, contrary to everything you think you know about how she feels, she believes it's perfectly acceptable.   Of course, there is one wee caveat.  In 2011, she told the president of Waverly High School's Gay-Straight Alliance in Iowa that gays and lesbians have every right to get married -- so long as they marry someone of the opposite sex.  

There!  It makes you wonder why, instead of wasting the Court's time, someone else hasn't come up with this practical solution. 

After all, who would know better than Michele Bachmann about such a situation.  Right?

In the immortal words of her fellow Republican, ditzy Dan Quayle: What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. 

Joe Gandelman at the Huffington Post very recently wrote The Michele Bachmann sideshow is hurting the GOP, in which he says that it's her sensationalist rhetoric that's destroying her credibility.  After all, when Bill O'Reilly attacks her for her CPAC attacks on the President, you know she has become GOP toast.  That rebranding thingy ain't working, guys, when you've got the likes of Michele Bachmann on the team. 

The most positive remark one can make about Bachmann is that, unlike Palin, she hasn’t yet begun choosing her wardrobe from the Dimwitted Sluts-R-Us Collection.