Bachmann: the return of Emily Litella

SUMMARY

Michele Bachmann does indeed bear an eerie psychological resemblance to Emily Litella, the addle-brained advocate of nonsensical causes on Saturday Night Live. Bachmann’s entire career, practically, is based on choosing an issue which she really doesn’t understand well, launching a doomed but lively public fight on that issue, and then capitalizing on the ensuing media brouhaha to launch yet another holy war. This stuff sounds funny, but it’s not: in one case she actually directed an angry mob into the Capitol for the express purpose of frightening members of Congress into changing their votes on health reform. Even Republicans are afraid of her: her inability to work and play well with others, her inability to listen to party leaders or stay on message or wait her turn, her inability to even keep her staffers in the office, got her thrown out of a leadership position in the state legislature and blocked from a leadership post in the U.S. House.

She is beyond the rightwing extreme on policy: she began as one of those people screaming at patients in front of abortion clinics, she branched out into “gay reparative therapy” in accordance with her rabid anti-gay beliefs, her views on education in particular are antediluvian, her views on the Middle East carry the odor of The Rapture, and she seemingly can’t stop spewing nasty racist-tinged attacks against Obama and his patriotism. She is so clueless that she hasn’t even learned Palin’s trick of avoiding the media’s microphones, which could cause trouble later, not only because she’s ignorant but also because she has ethical troubles back home.

This post is divided roughly into three sections, and you can skip forward to them by clicking on the links just below:

Bachmann the loose cannon
Bachmann’s extremism
Bachmann’s candidacy

DETAILS

Bachmann the loose cannon

A key thing to remember is that, for a potential presidential prospect, Michele Bachmann’s resume is unbelievably flimsy. Almost her entire career consists of extremist holy wars which she launches, based on a very poor grasp of the facts, to great public fanfare, until the effort collapses. Her career is very similar to the rants of Emily Litella from Saturday Night Live, going on television to shriek about “sax and violins on television” and “persecution of Soviet jewelry”, until someone corrects her misunderstanding and she signs off with an embarrassed “never mind!”

So, Bachmann’s career. She comes from a very conservative church and has very old-fashioned views on education. She got the idea in her head that the local school board in Minnesota was doing too little with old-fashioned homework and was giving the kids too many of these new-fangled “projects” to do. She launched an attempted coup d’etat against the school board, which failed, and organized a public jihad against a state senator, using the ensuing publicity to beat him in a legislative race.

Then in the state legislature, the same thing: she launched a jihad against gay marriage, which was very painful to her lesbian stepsister; the effort to launch a bill and a referendum both failed, but she exploited the publicity to win a seat in the U.S. House.

She then charged into battles with the GOP leadership, which all failed, but also attracted attention from the tea party. In the House, she embarked upon a pointless trip to Iraq and Afghanistan where she apparently learned nothing, introduced light-bulb legislation that was based on a misunderstanding of the scientific facts, tried to launch a constitutional amendment banning the use of foreign currency because she didn’t know it was already illegal and, in her one actual achievement, helped pass a tort reform bill based on the myth that trial lawyers are robbing us all blind.

That’s her entire career. She launches a holy war based on something she completely misunderstands, and fails, but exploits the resultant press coverage to gin up more attention for whatever addle-brained jihad she wants to fight next. Not only is her career dotted with these doomed, idiotic Emily Litella battles – it is, in fact, pretty much all she’s ever done. Other than these public jihads, she’s sponsored and passed two totally uncontroversial bills, one praising Minnesota’s 150^th anniversary and one praising people who take care of children. She knows nothing about policy: her only skill is attracting attention, and money from extremists.

This cluelessness seems to be rooted in the serious gaps in her own education and intellect. She insisted that the Founding Fathers treated whites and blacks the same and worked tirelessly to end slavery, which would be a surprise to Thomas Jefferson and indeed any U.S. history teacher over the last two hundred years. Her ignorance of women’s history was exposed when she completely missed the irony of quoting pro-choice activists in proclaiming her opposition to health reform: “under no certain circumstances will I give the government control over my body and my health care decisions." Political observers tried not to roll their eyes when she claimed Bill Clinton was “celebrating” the Oklahoma City bombing, demanded Pelosi’s impeachment for using a completely normal legislative procedure, and rewrote the history of Lexington and Concord even before Palin got involved. And spelling bee champs across the country choked on their milk when she pimped out her son Lucas as a “chick magnate” in a Christmas card.

Despite all this, she is positive she can do all the things presidents do: craft fiscal policy, negotiate treaties with foreign countries, and lead our troops in time of war.

To truly appreciate the danger of Michele Bachmann’s combination of ignorance and damn-the-torpedoes extremism: imagine it’s 2002 and angry Democrats try to stop the Iraq war by leading a mob through the halls of Congress with the express intent of intimidating Speaker Dennis Hastert into stopping the march to war – there is a good chance the Republicans would have gone insane and declared martial law. But that is exactly what Bachmann did during the health reform fight.

She directed her crazed followers to stalk the halls of Congress and “go up and down through the halls, find members of Congress, look at the whites of their eyes and say, 'Don't take away my healthcare…'This cannot pass. What we have to do today is make a covenant, to slit our wrists, be blood brothers on this thing. This will not pass. We will do whatever it takes to make sure this doesn't pass….'I think that will absolutely scare these members of Congress so much that Pelosi will not get the votes and it will kill the bill. I think it could be dead for 10 years. Why won’t we? Why won’t we go for broke?”

She specifically wanted the “anger” directed at the Speaker, Pelosi, second in the line of succession to the Presidency. In other words, terrorize our elected lawmakers into changing their votes…or else. Likewise Bachmann said she wanted Minnesotans "armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax because we need to fight back."…and then had to recant.

Presumably people will find her frightening in other countries too. Among other things, she has said she is okay with launching a nuclear strike against Iran.

Like many Republican politicians, she’s a crook. Her farm has been receiving about $20,000 a year in unjustified federal subsidies, a total of a quarter of a million or more already. She took a trip paid for by oil lobbyists, and then fought for more drilling offshore and in Alaska. And she looked out for her fellow crooks, writing a law that makes it harder for consumers to sue crooked businesses. She also sought a pardon for one of her big donors.

Bachmann is so frightening that, although the party rank and file adore her, Republican leaders are wary of her, particularly since she has no discipline, she won’t listen to party regulars, and she won’t wait her turn. Her positions in the Minnesota legislature were so extreme that her own fellow Republicans were forced to remove her from a leadership position in the Minnesota Senate. In the U.S. House, she angered party leaders by issuing her own response to the State Of The Union, competing with the Republican response from Paul Ryan. They’ve seen this movie recently: Bachmann, like Sarah Palin, is a dangerously clueless wingnut who could make the party look extremely foolish; they worry that Bachmann could parlay an Iowa caucus win into the presidential nomination and then go down in a historic general election drubbing.

A clear sign of trouble for her came when she announced her interest in running for a position in the House leadership, championed by Glenn Beck. Other House Republicans were concerned about her public gaffes, her high turnover in staff, her hotdogging, her insistence on pursuing her own agenda rather than the party’s, and her implication to national Republicans that anyone who doesn’t support her isn’t a real tea party member. Members of her own Minnesota delegation in the House publicly questioned her ability to work in a bipartisan fashion to solve national problems. When it came time to pick the House leaders, she was left out.

To give you a hint of the kind of chaotic leadership style she’d bring to the Oval Office: although she has a core team of advisers, she’s had six chiefs of staff in five years, five press secretaries, five legislative directors, three communications directors; she loses staffers constantly, due to her unpredictability, her inability to stick to a plan, her belief that anyone who questions her decisions must be disloyal, and her over-reliance on her husband for advice. She is a clumsy novice in some respects: when she launched her own response to the State of the Union, she kept addressing the wrong camera; she botched a VTC with a key Iowa audience, and botched a money-bomb fundraising effort due to insufficient preparation.

Bachmann’s extremism

Bachmann wants a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, claiming that gays are dysfunctional and that the gay community is specifically targeting children. She suggested that God would deliver America into the hands of its enemies along the lines of the Book of Judges because we condone homosexuality. Bachmann claimed that same-sex marriage was a totally new idea; in fact it was performed in pre-Christian China, the Roman Empire, medieval Europe, and native American tribes.

But let her speak for herself: ''[Gay marriage] is probably the biggest issue that will impact our state and our nation in the last, at least, thirty years. I am not understating that….This is an earthquake issue. This will change our state forever. Because the immediate consequence, if gay marriage goes through, is that K-12 little children will be forced to learn that homosexuality is normal, natural and perhaps they should try it…..And what a bizarre time we're in, when a judge will say to little children that you can't say the pledge of allegiance, but you must learn that homosexuality is normal and you should try it….Normalization [of gayness] through desensitization. Very effective way to do this with a bunch of second graders, is take a picture of 'The Lion King' for instance, and a teacher might say, 'Do you know that the music for this movie was written by a gay man?' The message is: I'm better at what I do, because I'm gay.''


She tried to exploit Melissa Etheridge’s breast cancer to take a shot at her for being a lesbian: "Unfortunately she is now suffering from breast cancer, so keep her in your prayers. 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."Bachmann on lesbians in general: "almost all, if not all, individuals who have gone into the lifestyle have been abused at one time in their life, either by a male or by a female."

Which brings us to a lad named Bradlee Dean, a pastor and a drummer in a Christian rock band. Dean claims that gays hated Jesus Christ, that gays caused the Holocaust, that gays violate federal law, that gay men on average will molest more than a hundred innocent people before being caught, that gays generally live to be only 42 years old, that gays are predators and are “aiming at your kids like crazy folks”, and that the murder of Matthew Shepard was just a drug deal that went bad. He believes that gays should be banned from government jobs and jailed, that gays dying would be a good idea, and that if America didn’t enforce anti-gay laws God would raise a foreign enemy to do it for us.

Dean accuses Muslim Congressman Keith Ellison of using gay rights to erase the Constitution and establish Sharia law: "I would say to the homosexuals: You better keep your eyes peeled….You are playing the fools. I knew there was a correlation. I knew it, I knew it, I knew it. And the homosexuals are using the Muslims to do it, and the Muslims are using the homosexuals to do it." In other words it’s all one big gay-Muslim conspiracy.

Dean’s ranting ranges far beyond gays and lesbians. Constantly using war and battle metaphors, insisting that Christians are called to war to preserve America, Dean attacks not only gays and lesbians but also Catholics, Muslims, Jews, people who believe in evolution, the big bad federal government, ands of course Obama, whom he characterizes as a criminal, a greater danger to America than bin Laden was, a man whom even blacks despise. Dean called the Pope a devil, compared the teaching of evolution to the philosophy of Hitler, and joined a hate group which also included Scott Roeder, who assassinated an abortion doctor -- a “sovereign citizen” group. He professes to love the Constitution and even teaches a class on the subject.

The truly dangerous part of Dean’s efforts involves schools. He markets himself as an anti-drug advocate, and schools invite him to speak, but when he arrives he inter-lards his anti-drug efforts with religious rhetoric, which is illegal in public schools, and anti-gay attacks. Schools have been forced to apologize for him afterward: his ministry erased its podcasts from the net after they received some unwanted scrutiny. His youth ministry is called You Can Run But You Cannot Hide, and you can imagine what kind of message this sort of “we’re coming to get you” ethos sends to gay students who are already hunted every day.

So why do we care about Bradlee Dean?

Because Michele Bachmann, Tim Pawlenty and other Minnesota Republicans are big supporters of Dean. Bachmann and others invited him to lead the opening prayer in a session of the Minnesota House, where his statements were so inflammatory that the Speaker apologized for Dean’s remarks and erased them from the House record. Bachmann and the other Republicans appear on Dean’s shows and attend his fundraisers and other events.

Bachmann is rapturous in her praise of Dean’s ministry: she said “It’s a tough job that you do, but someone has to do it.”  She wants Dean to light a fire that will “sweep Minnesota”; she thanked God for Dean’s efforts, “for how You are going to expand this radio program, how You are going to expand their video program, their publications, how You are going to advance them from 260 schools a year, Lord, to 2,600 schools a year.” In other words, Bachmann wants to spread Dean’s message to schools everywhere: instead of eradicating anti-gay hate in our schools, Bachmann wants to institutionalize it. If she has her way, it will be hunting season for gays.

One of the more bizarre collaborations by Bachmann and Dean is a claim that in 2005 a bunch of angry homosexuals locked Bachmann in a bathroom, which needless to say turned out to be unfounded. Dean himself claims he has been bullied by gays also.

If Bachmann were to win the White House, she clearly would  govern in accordance God’s will, to include the “messages” God gives her, but she would also be consulting with spiritual “advisors” like Dean. She could even invite this individual to deliver the convocation at her Inaugural, just as he was invited to the Minnesota legislature: just think of the message that would send to gays, lesbians, Muslims, the world community, and just about anyone who isn’t a knuckle-dragging bigot.

Since the media spent months obsessing about Obama’s tangential relationship with Jeremiah Wright, will they examine Bachmann’s relationship with Dean, who among other things belongs to a hate group that also included the murderer of an abortion doctor? What if Obama had a direct two-step link to a known assassin like Scott Roeder?


Her war on gays is just the most prominent facet of her extremism. For a while Bachmann went off on a series of rants, claiming that Obama was “anti-American” and demanding that the media expose him; she expanded this attack to Obama’s Congressional allies, appealing to the press to figure out who was “anti-America”. She implied that because of his associations with Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, Obama might have anti-American views. She later had to back down, but she still insisted that Obama is a socialist, and then in March 2010 she returned with "I said I had very serious concerns that Barack Obama had anti-American views. And now I look like Nostradamus!" Bachmann also insisted that Obama’s India trip involved 34 warships and cost $200 million a day, hinted that Obama caused the swine flu outbreak, and lied about the health reform bill, claiming that Obama didn’t give the Republicans enough time to read the health bill and hid $100 billion in expenses, including a slush fund for the Secretary of HHS. Her own Republican Governor, Arne Carlson, said it was her bonehead statements that impelled him to vote for Obama, and Colin Powell said the same thing.

Why does she hate Obama? Is it just partisan politics? One could argue that racism plays a role. She has asserted that Obama is running a “gangster” government, that Obama is turning us all into slaves, that ACORN played a role in the 2010 census, that half of all African-American pregnancies end in abortion which is “genocide”, and that “not all cultures are equal.'' She applauded the RNC chair like this: ''Michael Steele! You be da man! You be da man!''

She launched a holy war against the census, claiming it could lead to Nisei-style internment camps, or something. Her remarks were so over the line that even fellow Republicans had to warn her not to boycott the census.

Her extremism of course extends to economic and fiscal policy. She wants to phase out Social Security and Medicare and the EPA, she opposed the banking and automotive bailouts that saved our economy from disaster, and she thinks we could save the economy by eliminating the minimum wage. She accused Timothy Geithner of plotting to replace the dollar with foreign currency and advocated turning to Glenn Beck to solve our deficit problems.She claimed that Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty’s tax-free economic proposals were Marxism. She blamed the Depression on FDR’s “Hoot Smalley”, which was actually Smoot-Hawley, a Republican bill passed before FDR was even elected. During the health care battle she screeched about death panels, government takeovers, and euthanasia, claiming that the Nanny State wants to interfere in breastfeeding and that Obama will deny health care to political enemies.

Bachmann is, in a word, a social extremist. She started out as a “sidewalk counselor” terrorizing pregnant women at abortion clinics. She owns a “Christian counseling clinic”, which among other things does “gay reparative therapy.” She wanted to shut down the government unless the budget deal repealed the health reform law and defunded all Planned Parenthood programs, most of which have nothing to do with abortion. Her rhetoric was predictable: ''Does that mean that someone's 13-year-old daughter could walk into a sex clinic, have a pregnancy test done, be taken away to the local Planned Parenthood abortion clinic, have their abortion, be back and go home on the school bus? That night, mom and dad are never the wiser.'' And her fanaticism extends to similar issues: ''A woman [Terri Schiavo] was healthy. There was brain damage, there was no question. But from a health point of view, she was not terminally ill.''

She is a hard-core global-warming denier; she thinks it’s all a hoax, that carbon dioxide can’t hurt us because it’s naturally occurring. She claimed that regulating CO2 emissions would threaten life on earth, and called for armed revolution to prevent free market carbon exchanges. She is also an evolution denier, insisting ''there are hundreds and hundreds of scientists, many of them holding Nobel Prizes, who believe in intelligent design.''

Her views on education are pure Neanderthal, presumably on the time-honored reasoning that an ignorant voter is a Republican voter. She criticized the Minnesota school system for training children in marketable job skills. Seriously! She fought Pell grants for college students, a bill that even George Bush approved. She claims that federal education laws foster a socialist agenda of disloyalty to America. She claimed that Ted Kennedy wanted to put kids in mandatory reeducation camps under AmeriCorps, all while her son was participating in the AmeriCorps program as a teacher. She claimed that George Bush’s education policies would lead to communism, and claimed that regulations on the health of school lunches are unconstitutional.

Bachmann is lucid enough to realize that she should steer clear of foreign policy, but at one point she screeched that America would fall under a curse from the Almighty if we didn’t stand with Israel. Perhaps, like Pat Robertson, she would seek to conduct foreign policy in accordance with the mythology of The Rapture. Yikes.

On another occasion she suggested that Iran is planning on turning a big chunk of Iraq into a terrorist camp: "Iran is the troublemaker trying to tip over apple carts all over Baghdad right now because they want America to pull out. And you know why? It's because they've already decided, that they're going to territory, they're- they're going to partition Iraq and half of Iraq, the western northern portion of Iraq is going to be called, the United, uh, the, the uh, -oh, I'm sorry, I can't remember the actual name of it now, but it's going to be called, um, uh, the, the, uh, uh the Iraq State of Islam, something like that."

Steve Benen pointed out that Bachmann is telling people, based on no evidence whatsoever, that Obama secretly wants Medicare to fail so he can corral all the old folks into Obamacare. Then he did a riff on Bachmann’s political paranoia: “Bachmann’s ability to come up with remarkable conspiracy theories has always impressed me. Remember the time the right-wing presidential candidate argued that the U.S. Census may lead to “internment camps”? How about when she warned of a “one-world currency” because she got confused about what a global reserve currency is? Or maybe the time she thought the “Lion King” was secretly gay propaganda? How about the time she said a bipartisan national service bill could lead to “re-education camps”?”

Bachmann’s candidacy

Despite all this, desperate Republicans are touting her chances for 2012.  As opportunistic as Bachmann is, she must have been hanging on the edge of her chair during the first half of May 2011. Within a week or two, just when Bachmann was deciding whether to run, no less than five potential rivals were found on the ground dead or bleeding, or both. Huckabee quit, Trump left in disgrace, and Romney, Santorum and Gingrich were all being beaten bloody by other Republicans. A less ambitious person than Bachmann would be hiring Iowa staff in a heartbeat.

Rush and Beck are stout defenders, but the Daily Caller put out a hit piece on her, a sign of her growing national profile. She is raising tons of money and intends to reveal her intentions in Iowa, which suggests she will in fact run. Intrade expects her to win the critical Ames straw poll in Iowa. She hired Ed Rollins for her campaign, and Rollins' first move was to throw an elbow at Palin, calling her "not serious".

In terms of communication, she is the opposite of Palin. Palin was so burned by the media attention she got in 2008 that she runs from reporters; Bachmann dives in and talks to the press, giving them one dangerously clueless quote after another. To her credit, so far she is not as thin-skinned as Palin, and her crazy statements are more tilted toward mere extremism than sheer insanity, although she has been known to dole out both to the microphones: this, at least, will make her a bit more credible during the primary season. And she has less baggage than Palin too.