Michele Batshit Bachmann
Bachmann: Schools should teach intelligent design
But President of which America? one where poor people become poorer, (but she would still like your vote) and rich people become richer, seems to be Bachmann's ideal for the future one Nation Under God. Doesn't strike me as a terribly Christian ethos to say the least.
Bachmann Says She Would Eliminate Minimum Wage to Spur Growth
Abortion, birth control, women's rights, church and state? I don't even need to offer links, because you know exactly what her position is going to be on all these issues.
But if you wish you can read/watch as Democracy Now looks a little deeper into Bachmann's past; lies included. Far too professional a broadcaster to do it herself, Amy Goodman leaves it to her two guests to pick apart Michele Bachmann.
''A perfect Product of the Religious Right'' Deconstructing Michele Bachmann's GOP Presidential Bid.
And so to our featured article courtesy of Rolling Stone.
I suppose there are many things that make for a good article. Primarily it must hold your interest. Being informative certainly does no harm, even less harm to the message on offer, is that the thing is well written. Dependant on one's viewpoint I suppose, as to what constitutes well written that is, personally speaking I have always been an advocate for a good term of phrase.
Being a great fan, and reasonably read of the works of the master himself, the darling Oscar, might in someway explain my appreciation of the aforementioned well rounded phrase. Whereas sadly, we are unlikely ever again to be treated to words comparable or as sophisticated as those uttered by the inimitable old dear, that doesn't mean we can't still appreciate the contributions of twenty first century others.
Nor for that matter, do we even need such Oscaresque sophistication; Oscar was indeed a man of the world, but we could never label him a man of the common people. That I suppose, is the difference between now and then, Wilde was a man of his time, playing to a contemporary gallery, just as our writer in question is equally a man of his time, and his own style contemporaneous with his own gallery, to wit, the readers of Rolling Stone.
So what can we look forward to in this offering, interesting and informative apart? Scattered throughout, like seeds at a tennis match, such delights as this:
Bachmann is a religious zealot whose brain is a raging electrical storm of divine visions and paranoid delusions.
Not to shabby for an opener, you'll try a little more?
...when she turns her head toward the cameras and brandishes her pearls and her ageless, unblemished neckline and her perfect suburban orthodontics in an attempt to reassure the unbeliever of her non-threateningness, is one of the scariest sights in the entire American cultural tableau
And still barely past halfway on the title page:
...is a rare breed of political psychopath, equal parts crazed Divine Wind kamikaze-for-Jesus and calculating, six-faced Machiavellian prevaricator
Do drive on, do enjoy.
Michele Bachmann's Holy War
The Tea Party contender may seem like a goofball, but be warned: Her presidential campaign is no laughing matter
By Matt Taibbi
June 22, 2011Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and, as you consider the career and future presidential prospects of an incredible American phenomenon named Michele Bachmann, do one more thing. Don't laugh.
It may be the hardest thing you ever do, for Michele Bachmann is almost certainly the funniest thing that has ever happened to American presidential politics. Fans of obscure 1970s television may remember a short-lived children's show called Far Out Space Nuts, in which a pair of dimwitted NASA repairmen, one of whom is played by Bob (Gilligan) Denver, accidentally send themselves into space by pressing "launch" instead of "lunch" inside a capsule they were fixing at Cape Canaveral. This plot device roughly approximates the political and cultural mechanism that is sending Michele Bachmann hurtling in the direction of the Oval Office.
Bachmann is a religious zealot whose brain is a raging electrical storm of divine visions and paranoid delusions. She believes that the Chinese are plotting to replace the dollar bill, that light bulbs are killing our dogs and cats, and that God personally chose her to become both an IRS attorney who would spend years hounding taxpayers and a raging anti-tax Tea Party crusader against big government. She kicked off her unofficial presidential campaign in New Hampshire, by mistakenly declaring it the birthplace of the American Revolution. "It's your state that fired the shot that was heard around the world!" she gushed. "You are the state of Lexington and Concord, you started the battle for liberty right here in your backyard."
Videos: Michele Bachmann's Craziest Moments
I said lunch, not launch! But don't laugh. Don't do it. And don't look her in the eyes; don't let her smile at you. Michele Bachmann, when she turns her head toward the cameras and brandishes her pearls and her ageless, unblemished neckline and her perfect suburban orthodontics in an attempt to reassure the unbeliever of her non-threateningness, is one of the scariest sights in the entire American cultural tableau. She's trying to look like June Cleaver, but she actually looks like the T2 skeleton posing for a passport photo. You will want to laugh, but don't, because the secret of Bachmann's success is that every time you laugh at her, she gets stronger.
In modern American politics, being the right kind of ignorant and entertainingly crazy is like having a big right hand in boxing; you've always got a puncher's chance. And Bachmann is exactly the right kind of completely batshit crazy. Not medically crazy, not talking-to-herself-on-the-subway crazy, but grandiose crazy, late-stage Kim Jong-Il crazy — crazy in the sense that she's living completely inside her own mind, frenetically pacing the hallways of a vast sand castle she's built in there, unable to meaningfully communicate with the human beings on the other side of the moat, who are all presumed to be enemies.
Bachmann's story, to hear her tell it, is about a suburban homemaker who is chosen by God to become a politician who will restore faith and family values to public life and do battle with secular humanism. But by the time you've finished reviewing her record of lies and embellishments and contradictions, you'll have no idea if she actually believes in her own divine inspiration, or whether it's a big con job. Or maybe both are true — in which case this hard-charging challenger for the GOP nomination is a rare breed of political psychopath, equal parts crazed Divine Wind kamikaze-for-Jesus and calculating, six-faced Machiavellian prevaricator. Whatever she is, she's no joke.
Matt Taibbi's 'The Truth About the Tea Party'
Bachmann was born Michele Amble in Waterloo, Iowa, to a pair of lifelong Democrats, but grew up in tiny Anoka, Minnesota. By her teen years, her parents had divorced; her mother remarried and brought step-siblings into the home, creating a Brady Bunchian group of nine kids. One of Bachmann's step-siblings, Helen LaFave, would later come out as a lesbian, a fact that Michele, who became famous opposing gay marriage, never mentions on the campaign trail. For the most part, though, Bachmann's upbringing seems like pure Americana, a typical Midwestern girl who was "in a couple of beauty pageants" and "not overtly political," according to her stepbrother Michael LaFave.
Young Michele found Jesus at age 16, not long before she went away to Winona State University and met a doltish, like-minded believer named Marcus Bachmann. After finishing college, the two committed young Christians moved to Oklahoma, where Michele entered one of the most ridiculous learning institutions in the Western Hemisphere, a sort of highway rest area with legal accreditation called the O.W. Coburn School of Law; Michele was a member of its inaugural class in 1979.
Originally a division of Oral Roberts University, this august academy, dedicated to the teaching of "the law from a biblical worldview," has gone through no fewer than three names — including the Christian Broadcasting Network School of Law. Those familiar with the darker chapters in George W. Bush's presidency might recognize the school's current name, the Regent University School of Law. Yes, this was the tiny educational outhouse that, despite being the 136th-ranked law school in the country, where 60 percent of graduates flunked the bar, produced a flood of entrants into the Bush Justice Department.
Regent was unabashed in its desire that its graduates enter government and become "change agents" who would help bring the law more in line with "eternal principles of justice," i.e., biblical morality. To that end, Bachmann was mentored by a crackpot Christian extremist professor named John Eidsmoe, a frequent contributor to John Birch Society publications who once opined that he could imagine Jesus carrying an M16 and who spent considerable space in one of his books musing about the feasibility of criminalizing blasphemy.
Take the Bachmann-Palin Challenge: Can You Tell Them Apart?
This background is significant considering Bachmann's leadership role in the Tea Party, a movement ostensibly founded on ideas of limited government. Bachmann says she believes in a limited state, but she was educated in an extremist Christian tradition that rejects the entire notion of a separate, secular legal authority and views earthly law as an instrument for interpreting biblical values. As a legislator, she not only worked to impose a ban on gay marriage, she also endorsed a report that proposed banning anyone who "espoused or supported Shariah law" from immigrating to the U.S. (Bachmann seems so unduly obsessed with Shariah law that, after listening to her frequent pronouncements on the subject, one begins to wonder if her crazed antipathy isn't born of professional jealousy.)
This discrepancy may account for why some Tea Party leaders don't buy Bachmann as a champion of small government. "Michele Bachmann is — what's the old-school term? — a poser," says Chris Littleton, an Ohio Tea Party leader troubled by her support of the Patriot Act and other big-government interventions. "Look at her record and see how 'Tea Party' she really is." Go to page two.
For readers who are unfamiliar with the workings of the Christian Right colleges, below is a Channel 4 documentary, God's Next Army, featuring not Michel Bachman's seat of learning, one of the most ridiculous learning institutions in the Western Hemisphere, a sort of highway rest area with legal accreditation called the O.W. Coburn School of Law previously part of Oral Roberts University, but that of another ''University'' that has the same curriculum employing the same single text book, Patrick Henry College.
This little quote by the principal Michael Farris seems to sum the whole thing up.
"We don't need the world's knowledge and information to guide us."
Something that always stuck with me after having watched the thing previously, was the reaction of one of these home schoolers (18 years old) on his first trip to Washington, was how awestruck he was when taking his first trip on the subway and that he was travelling by electricity!. One minute in on part four.
Part one of six.
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