Thursday Stuff

And now it’s time to take a ride on the crazy train, my fellow prisoners…

#6, Paul Ryan
#7, Louie Gohmert
#8, Allen West
#9, Joe Pitts
#10, Jack Kingston
#11, Patrick McHenry
#12, Spencer Bachus
#13, Jim Gerlach
#14, Cliff Stearns
#15, Jean Schmidt
#16, Phil Gingrey
#17, David Schweikert
#18, Virginia Foxx
#19, Pete Sessions
#20, Charlie Dent
#21, Cathy McMorris Rodgers
#22, Chris Smith
#23, Todd Akin
#24, Buck McKeon
#25, Kristi Noem
#26, Hal Rogers
#27, Lou Barletta (Two bonus selections: Boren and Ross)
#28, Paul Broun
#29, Mary Bono Mack
#30, David Dreier
#31, Marsha Blackburn (including backgrounder)

…and that means it’s time to turn to #5 on the list of U.S. House Republicans trying to overturn health care reform, and that would be none other than Michele (“Moon Unit”) Bachmann of Minnesota.

There are a few different facets and personalities, I guess you could say, when talking about today’s Republican Party. There’s the utterly shameless corporate facet that would sell the pennies on their grandmother’s eyes if they could use the money to launch a campaign attack ad (John Boehner, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, etc.). There’s the rabid, openly combative wing of the party that routinely tries to bait anyone and anything that is contrary to their beliefs (Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry). And there are also many other individuals who, I realize, cross over multiple categories.

But when it comes to sheer deer-in-the-headlights moonbattery, Bachmann is the undisputed leader of the pack.

At Matt Taibbi reported in Rolling Stone in June of last year…

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."

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.

And actually, when you think of it, it’s a testimony to her political acumen that she managed to out flank Just Plain Folks Sarah Palin Donctcha Know among the “values” voter crowd while the former half-term governor of Alaska was debating in front of everyone who cared to listen in the matter of whether or not she wanted to take a shot at becoming her party’s standard bearer; while Palin was doing her little fan dance of a fashion on Fix Noise, Bachmann was out doing the glad-handling politico stuff that, even though it constitutes epic drudgery for most other life forms (kissing babies, shaking hands, attending 4-H club dinners on the stump), is nevertheless important when you’re trying to build a legitimate grass roots campaign.

Also on the subject of the Repugs’ own particular brand of crazy, I think it is a further testimony to Bachmann that it took at least four men to end up neutralizing her (Santorum, Gingrich and Perry, along with pizza man Herman Cain…well, maybe five if you count Ron Paul) and thus clear the way for the choice of the individuals who truly call the shots in that party, and that would be the plutocrat-in-chief himself, Willard Mitt Romney, as well as Puppy-Dog-Eyes (With The Shiv In His Pocket) Paul Ryan.

But this is all supposed to be about Bachmann and health care reform, so I’ll now turn to that…

Here, she tells us what she plans to do about the law (how many times can you say “repeal” in one sentence, I wonder?).

Here, she started down the road of demonizing the HPV vaccine against cervical cancer, claiming it could cause mental retardation, which happens to run contrary to all medical evidence to date (to be honest, aside from the other candidates, that may have doomed her candidacy more than anything else).

Here, she accused Huma Abedin, aide to Secretary of State Clinton and wife of former U.S. House Rep Anthony Weiner, of engaging in “The Ramadan Conspiracy,” or something (yep, just like Louie Gohmert, as I noted a few days ago).

Oh, and when talking about Bachmann, who can forget this truly precious moment when an eight-year-old boy told her that his mom is gay and “doesn’t need fixing”?

And who can forget this moment when she said thank you to a caller to a phone-in radio show who said he would vote for Charles Manson over President Obama (uh, no – the correct response is “Mister, you’re a freaking lunatic and you need professional help.”).

Here, Bachmann meant to praise John Wayne, but ended up praising serial killer John Wayne Gacy instead (as Matt Taibbi says, if you laugh at her, she just gets stronger).

And in kind of a litmus test of sorts for her party, Bachmann claimed here that she never personally benefitted from earmarks, even though she did (I always felt the so-called earmark controversy was nothing but a tempest in a proverbial tea bag, if you will).

Last and certainly least, she (as noted here in January 2011)…

…unveiled a plan to cut $400 billion in federal spending that includes freezing the Veterans Affairs Department’s health care spending and cuts veterans’ disability benefits. The Air Force Times reports her plan would slice $4.5 billion from the VA, including reducing 150,000 veterans’ disability compensation and the amount they receive in Social Security Disability Income.

Actually, I guess I stand corrected; maybe Bachmann represents more of the Boehner/Ryan/McConnell wing than I thought – anyway, here’s a video of her in action from February 2009, with Keith Olbermann and Chris Hayes having a bit of fun about how today's Republican Party was supposedly approaching irrelevance or something...would that that were true, though no one was chuckling over a year and a half later, after our corporate media started paying way, waaay too much attention to the racist-sign-and-funny-hat crowd…



Update 8/17/12: Curious...

...and on this general topic, this tune works for me.