God has called me to defend Michele Bachmann

So, what have we learned?  That Michele Bachmann wouldn’t win a game of Trivial Pursuit?

It’s not surprising that since she left her home state of Iowa for the wilds of Minnesota when she was 12 she’s forgotten that John Wayne was from Winterset not Waterloo.  After all, since she left Iowa she’s forgotten what it means to be a Democrat too.

And while it’s an almost amusing coincidence that the serial killer John Wayne Gacy spent some time in Waterloo, that’s all it was a coincidence.  She wasn’t confusing the murderer with the movie star.

As for the movie star whose spirit she invoked, she was only doing what millions of Americans have done for decades, taking the screen persona for the actual man.  Anyway, it’s just symbolic, a form of flag waving.  Pointing out that the man wasn’t like the character he played is like pointing out that the flag is a cheap piece of cloth during the Pledge of Allegiance while noting also that Pledge was written by a socialist.  All you’re doing is making yourself look like a humorless, clueless, sanctimonious know-it-all.

Parading your own virtue doesn’t persuade anybody who isn’t already marching along with you.  Showing off how much smarter you are than Michele Bachman on this one is showing off how much smarter you are than the average American and that’s just…showing off.

The things she said about Waterloo and John Wayne were campaign boilerplate and far from being the most deranged, ignorant and dangerous thing she’s said in her brief career.  The most truly deranged, ignorant, and dangerous thing she’s said…

Well, besides wanting to abolish the minimum wage…

And Social Security…

And Medicare…

And thinking it won’t cause any problems if Congress doesn’t raise the debt ceiling..

…and  a couple dozen other things…

…is that God has called upon her to run for President.

As far as I know, God didn’t call upon George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, or even Ronald Reagan. Doesn’t it seem odd that after ignoring them He’d give Michele Bachmann the divine nod?

Of course it’s odd!  It’s lunatic.  But as far as the journalists covering her are concerned, it’s barely worth mentioning.

As far as the New York Times and NPR cared the other day, Michele Bachmann might as well be Rick Perry who might as well be Mitch Daniels who might as well be Mike Huckabee who might as well be Sarah Palin who might as well be Tina Fey.  The only interesting thing about her is the what would have been for them the only interesting thing about the others.  Her presence in the race makes things more fun to write and talk about.

Michele Bachman can’t keep her facts straight.  She lies reflexively.  She has no clear understanding of how things are and how they work.  And she believes that whatever comes out of her mouth must be still be the truth because she’s chosen by God.  Her thinking is wildly disordered because her brain is constantly at work making whatever enters it fit her paranoid and apocalyptic world-view.  Bachmann believes that she has been called by God to be the heroine in a fight against the forces of evil in which victory will be the shredding of the Social Contract.

She says this all the time.  She brags about it.  She is a Right Wing Christianist idealogue on a mission from God to punish those who don’t enjoy God’s favor, which is to say, those Michele Bachmann loathes and despises.   And the Media ignores it.

I wish I had favorited it or RT-ed or just flat out memorized it so I could give proper credit, but someone I follow on Twitter wrote the other day that if a person stood on a street corner and started shouting at the crowds the sort of things Bachmann says wherever she goes, people would cross the street against traffic in their hurry to put space between themselves and the nut.

But let the nut stand on a platform surrounded by flags and crowds swarm and the Media reports on those flags and the size of the crowds.

The journalists covering her know what she really is but they don’t feel they can say it unless they can find a Democrat they can paint as being just as bad.  And since there are no Democrats running for the Republican nomination for President, not even crazy ones, their only alternative is to wait for one of her opponents to point out that she’s nuts.  It’s actually a story that none of them will because they’re all afraid of angering the Religious Right which is made up mainly of people whose beliefs are as radical and as paranoid and as apocalyptic as Bachmann’s, but that hasn’t ever been a story the Beltway Media has longed to tell.

These profiles of Bachmann, in the New York Times and on NPR skim over her religious beliefs without ever diving down to explore how they infect her politics.

Instead, they glom onto the “gaffe.”

Look, isn’t it funny?  She’s from Iowa but she didn’t know what we didn’t know until somebody on the web looked it up that John Wayne is from Winterset not Waterloo!  Har dee har har!

This amounts to telling people who are worried about their jobs, struggling to meet their mortgages, scrimping at the grocery store, and waking up in the middle of the night terrified about what will happen if they get sick or the car breaks down or their kid doesn’t get enough financial aid that Michele Bachmann would have lost on Final Jeopardy.

As Atrios said, with a nod to Jay Rosen:

The press feels empowered to jump all over these trivial things while not empowered to point out facts when two sides disagree or to explain the horrible consequences of certain policies. Aside from failing to educate the public, this has an additional pernicious effect. It helps to convince the vast majority of people who only kinda sorta pay attention to politics that Maureen Dowd is right, that this trivial bullshit is what really matters in politics.

So the average Jane and Joe tune out and stay home leaving the decisions to the True Believers.

It’s convenient for journalists to treat politics as a trivial game played by teams of cynical opportunists on both sides.  It means they don’t have to care or pay close attention.  They don’t have to know anything because there’s nothing to know except who’s winning at the moment, which appears to Michele Bachman, look at those poll numbers jump!  Why only 78 out of 100 Iowa Republicans don’t plan to vote for her now!

Lamestream media types can content themselves with being knowing as opposed to actually knowing stuff.  The rest of us need to know more than that John Wayne was born in Winterset and dodged the draft during World War II while John Wayne Gacy served chicken dinners in Waterloo prior to moving on to Illinois to become a mass murderer, oh, and the American Revolution started in Concord, Massachusetts not Concord, New Hampshire.

We need to know more than how much better we’d do than  than Michele Bachmann if we’re ever on Jeopardy.

Michele Bachmann is on a mission from a God she’s remade in her own image, which makes him a nasty, vicious, vindictive, paranoid, socially and economically destructive God…

…Who wouldn’t do well on Jeopardy.

Photo by Jim Cole for AP via NPR.

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Comments

[John Emerson]

Prosperity gospel Christians believe that anything good that happens to them, e.g. money, is a blessing from God and means that they have pleased God, and that anything bad that happens to anyone is God's curse and means that they've displeased God. They also believe that, when Christians drop down into the evil world to save it, sometimes that have to do evil too, and that's OK because they're doing to for a good cause. And they also believe that if a Godly person slips and sins but then repents, they're still better people than even the virtuous unbelievers.

In other words, it's self-serving fropm top to bottom. It's stuff that would you make you suspect psychopathy or cluelessness if someone believed it for non-religious reasons.

Religious tolerance is sort of a messy way of accommodating the fact of religious diversity. And there has to be some line beyond which intolerable beliefs and practices cannot be excused on religious grounds. Bachmann's heavily-politicized religion is a legitimate reason to vote against her.

[actor212]

I get your point, Lance, but here's the thing: this was not an off-the-cuff remark. It was not a throwaway line. It was a planned statement that SOMEone must have inserted into her speech.

Now that either means she's a complete idiot for not vetting her speech more carefully or she's got a serious mental incapacity in that either herself or her staff left that in after, yup, checking.

That, we need to know about.

True, her substantive points need exploration, but in what I'm going to call the Actor212 Theorem of Conservation of Energy, I'd rather the press hit the softball out of the park and eliminate the need to expend energy on something from someone who will be irrelevant within weeks, saving it to work on the position papers of Romney and Perry.

When McCain ran in 2008 against Obama, no one spent much energy tracking down unsubstantiated rumours on either of them (save the birthers, of course). Palin came into some flack, yes, but then Palin brought an awful lot of that on herself. Too, she was an unknown and so was deserving of investigation. She was the clown car at the circus while the roadies mopped up the guy who fell off the high wire.

[Sherri]

I don't think Bachmann is a Prosperity Gospel type. She's actually much stranger. Yes, she believes that anything good that happens to her is a blessing from God and that she's pleased God, but anything bad that happens to her is not a curse from God, but an attack by Satan, and therefore further indication that she's on the right path in serving God. So, nothing is ever a sign that she's on the wrong path. Bad things happening to other people is just a sign that they aren't Real True Christians.

[chris the cop]

I don't know if Michele has the brains of a turnip or not. I do know that "God has called upon her to run for president" does sound goofy, but

"It means that I have a sense of assurance about the direction I think that God is speaking into my heart that I should go"
(From the same CBS interview)

does not.

I don't think she's going to be "irrelevant wihtin weeks," either, for better or worse.

A coupla cheap shots too many in this one, Lance.

[Jeff Boatright]

As I read elsewhere on teh 'toobes today, it's instructive to remember that Howard Dean was run out of town over one syllable taken out of context and literally amplified by the media. One syllable. Yet Bachman can rant for YEARS, spinning complete fantasies that inform her policy decisions, and not ONE of her wacko (and public) proclamations gets picked up by the press. Not one.

[sfmike]

"Founding Fathers Ended Slavery" might not be as easy to shrug off. Yes, the press is stupid in its coverage of power politics, but I agree with actor212 about being thankful that they are at least hitting the softballs out of the park.

[Gabrielratchet.blogspot.com]

More proof, as if any were needed, of the old saying that if you talk to God, you're religious, but if God talks to you, you're schizophrenic....

[Kevin Wolf]

Well, I think you're spot on, Lance. Bachmann's religion is the wellspring of her hideous policies - and she should be taken to task for those by her opponents and by the press. But she won't be.

Her ignorance, though, is standard issue for the radical right wing in this country. They are willfully, gleefully ignorant but being wrong doesn't seem to matter these days.

[Earl Bockenfeld]

Bachmann was trying to find a way to justify her ridiculous claim that the Founding Fathers "fought tirelessly" to end slavery, and what she happened upon was to put the whole burden of that conclusion upon John Quincy Adams who wasn't actually a Founding Father, though he was the son of one.

What saddens me is that neither Bachmann nor the people who support Bachmann know the slightest bit about American history they pretend to revere so deeply. The fact is that there was at least one Founding Father who was steadfastly opposed to slavery: Benjamin Franklin.

Franklin signed a letter, along with the Pennsylvania Quakers, to Congress that caused a big stir. They asked the newly formed United States Congress to end the practice of slavery. The prominence of that signature, Franklin being the only man in America who approached George Washington in terms of being universally respected, was such that it threatened the fragile democracy, which was only able to be formed because the non-slave states agreed to the Great Silence (Article 1, Section 9, Clause 1 of the Constitution), as well as some other provisions regarding the slave trade. Southern representatives would not even discuss abolishing slavery and only the slave trade, the importation of new people into the United States, made it into the Constitution, and then only to provide rules against discussing ending the slave trade or taxing it.

Bachmann could have avoided most of her ridicule by using Ben Franklin instead of John Quincy Adams. But they can’t back Ben Franklin. He liked the French, sex, and was also an original scientist. Basically, everything they hate.

[pseudonymous in nc]

A coupla cheap shots too many in this one, Lance.

I think Lance pulled his punches. Bachmann is a crazy person. A crazy person with a degree of political capability, but politics is traditionally one of those areas where crazy delusional people can do scarily well. And as Matt Taibbi rightly said, "Bachmann is exactly the right kind of completely batshit crazy" to avoid the disdain she deserves, while other politicians have been declared beyond the pale for such craziness as advocating universal healthcare.

That's a genuine structural problem, as is the way the press clearly want her to stick around and provide entertainment value for the reality show that is the presidential horse-race.

[TheUberTuber]

Did somebody mention turnips?! You guys would probably like my Facebook page called "Who's Smarter: Michele Bachmann, or this Turnip?"

http://www.facebook.com/turnipN2010

11,000 Turnipites can't all be wrong.

BTW, great article. I hope you don't mind if I post a link to it on my page.

[Rob]

The guys on the street corner screaming their nonsense are fine. Crazy, but fine. But when you aim to be the President of the United States, you must be spot on, all the time. No mistakes. And when you do make them, you have to own up. Be humble. Admit human failings. Apologize and move on. That's an unrealistic expectation to put on anyone; I'll admit that. But we crucified Dan Quaile for his gaffs. And when Al Gore invented the internet, we railed at him. The problem is that most of the dumb (and I make no apologies for using that term) people in this country are happy to hear things that make them feel good and "sound about right." They don't want to think. So they don't. And Michelle is cute. And "heck, I can relate to her!" Well, that's going to get us a whole lot of trouble. We do not need nor should we want a President who is just one of the people. The average person is not suited to be President. But, maybe it will lead to a real revolution. Maybe if the Tea Party finds itself floating in Boston Harbor, maybe we can get around to fixing the country's problems. Ignorance should be top priority. But taking away people's ignorance is like taking away their guns. Heaven forbid!

[Sean Cooper]

I hope she gets the nomination, a smart phony baloney twerp like Romney scares me as a candidate more than she does. Romney is an empty suit, but smarter then the others, and gives the press no trivia fodder for their tiny minds to latch on to. And when he is the nominee, they'll politely take his words down like the stenographers that they are, and do any reporting of substance on him.