GOP Presidential Woefuls #1 — Bachmann Mental Underdrive.

by Michael Matheron · August 21, 2011

Bachmann’s Mental Underdrive. Michele Bachmann, the Tea Partiers’ Tea Partier was initially criticized by the TP grassroots for attempting to co-opt the movement, which, of course, she was. She’s now among the TP leadership, if not yet “the” leader. Although her job as a leader of this gaggle of utterly self-centered Randian individualists is like trying to herd cats on amphetamines with chihuahuas, they do seem to have warmed to her at the grassroots level. After all, following her win at the Ames Iowa straw poll, she, not their erstwhile pal Sarah Palin, is a leading candidate for the GOP/TP presidential nomination.

My suggestion for a Bachmann campaign poster.
I have not yet heard back. I’ll keep you in the loop.

Of course, rationally considered, her credentials would have to improve markedly to be paper thin. This is irrelevant to Tea Partiers. They simply want to embrace someone who reflects their own lives and beliefs. They speak evangelical. They speak a dialect of crazy seldom heard in such volume. They want someone who knows that facts are liberal, a socialist’s playground. Feelings, beliefs, and common sense trump that left wing claptrap. Michele Bachmann is the Tea Party trump card, literally spouting such outrageous attacks on facts and accuracy that opponents are often left speechless. Tea Party folks like to see pointy-heads speechless. Bachmann’s their kind. She hasn’t let them down, and was rewarded by her win in the Ames straw poll last week.

So, here’s their leading light, a preview of a President Bachmann, for whom facts, rationality, and accuracy are gnats buzzing around her head, something to be swatted away.

Michele Bachmann, historian. Bachmann continues to believe that the Founding Fathers “worked tirelessly to eliminate slavery,” and – remarkably – that John Quincy Adams was one of them, although he was not yet nine years old when the Declaration of Independence was signed.
Michele Bachmann, constitutional lawyer. She maintains the census is “unconstitutional,” despite the Constitutional text, Article I, sec. 2, clause 3.
Michele Bachmann, ecologist. In 2009 she explained, “Carbon dioxide is portrayed as harmful. But there isn’t even one study that can be produced that shows that carbon dioxide is a harmful gas.” Climate changers seeking to reduce carbon dioxide emissions are suggesting “an arbitrary reduction in something that is naturally occurring in Earth.”
Michele Bachmann, M.D. She diagnosed Terry Schiavo as “healthy,” i.e. “from a health point of view, she was not terminally ill.”
Michele Bachmann, travel writer. Describing her 2007 trip to Iraq, she informed, “[T]here’s a commonality with the Mall of America, in that it’s on that proportion. There’s marble everywhere. The other thing I remarked about was there is water everywhere.”
Michele Bachmann, the compassionate. She reached out to Melissa Etheridge after her diagnosis of cancer with a sweet commiseration, “This may be an opportunity for her now to be open to some spiritual things, now that she is suffering with that physical disease. She is a lesbian.”
Michele Bachmann, the courageous. As a Minnesota state senator she apparently believed she was being kidnapped by lesbians, two women who, it turns out, were merely trying to speak to her about same sex marriage (which she vehemently opposed). She filed a police report. The Washington County attorney, however, declined to press charges, “It seems clear from the statements given by both women that they simply wanted to discuss certain issues further with Ms. Bachmann.”
Michele Bachmann, Elvis fan. Last Tuesday in South Carolina, she took the stage and encouraged the crowd to say happy birthday to Elvis Presley. It was the 34th anniversary of Elvis’s death.
Michele Bachmann, John Wayne fan. Kicking off her campaign in Iowa, she informed the crowd, “Well what I want them to know is just like, John Wayne was from Waterloo, Iowa. That’s the kind of spirit that I have, too!” In fact, Waterloo was home to John Wayne Gacy, the Killer Clown who murdered 33 men and boys in the 1970s.
Michele Bachmann, foreign policy maven. Last Thursday on Jay Sekulow’s conservative radio talk show she observed that Americans “fear the rise of the Soviet Union.” Who knew?
Michele Bachmann, world historian. Bachmann believes that the Italian Renaissance was responsible for the growth of tyranny that she believes threatens America today.
Michele Bachmann, epidemiologist. “I find it interesting that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out under another, then under another Democrat president, Jimmy Carter. I’m not blaming this on President Obama, I just think it’s an interesting coincidence.” July 2009.
Michele Bachmann, Junior FBI agent. “I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out: Are they pro-America or anti-America?” Oct. 2008.
Michele Bachmann, social historian. She recently signed the following statement, thought up by Iowa conservatives:

Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African-American President.

And here’s a video anthology,