I Admit It, I Love Michele Bachmann
By Brian Lambert
Our girl Michelle is obviously making the familiar calculation that
there really is no such thing as too much, too far, or excess when it
comes to rallying the Republican Party's activist base. Her line about
getting "armed and dangerous" in opposition to President Obama's carbon
tax—a little straight-from-the-hip shootin' delivered on John
"Powerline" Hinderaker's The Patriot 1280 radio show this weekend—was
another example of where conservative leadership is in the country
today, post two lost duels at the ballot box.
The kerfuffle over Rush Limbaugh as Putative Head of the GOP has barely died down when we are reminded that Bachmann is working off the same game plan that her party rode to pyrrhic victories with Bill Clinton's impeachment and George W. Bush's presidency. Likewise, she is a woman who has plainly studied the meteoric rise and attention accorded Sarah Palin, another good-looking gal with minimal qualitative intellect but high self-esteem and ambition.
Put simply, the time-tested strategy is: Fire-ready-aim cowboy/girl nihilism.
"They" (liberals, Obama, Barney Frank, etc.) are so bad that we "real Americans" need to think B-movie destruction. And don't get all mired down and "nuancy" about a plan to bring the cattle in off the prairie and get them to market. That "plan" stuff is for Hollywood liberals.
The New York Times's David Brooks invoked "nihilism" ("Where's za money, Lebowski?") in the aftermath of Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal's spacey "response" to Obama's address to Congress last month, and he had it about right. Between the Republican Party's well-monetized religious necromancers (who have the intellectual equivalent of wet dreams imagining God's wrathful apocalypse) and its "states' rightists" longing for legal cover to round up everyone browner than Elizabeth Hasselbeck and ship them back to Guatemala, there really aren't any adults driving the GOP buggy.
This vacuum is a wellspring of opportunity for the likes of Congresswoman Bachmann and her enablers on talk radio. (Far from expressing any level of contrition for her constant gaffes and "misstatements"—like being way down on the list of those taking earmarks —Bachmann's star only rises when she gets on with Hinderaker or Chris Baker or—has she done Michael Savage lately?
Which is why I—an unrepentant liberal—love her.
The media groupthink talking point of the moment revolves around whether Obama is biting off more than he can chew, referring to the combination of the, uh, "recession" and his plans for energy and health care reform and improved education. You expect short attention spans from the general public. But a lot of these press types followed Obama for months and listened to his stump speeches hundreds of times without apparently ever hear him talk about doing exactly what he is intent on doing now. (Maybe they were too busy Twittering to listen to what anybody was saying?)
If any of the usual media suspects mentioned how the cost of putting health care, energy, and education right is substantially higher now due to the abject neglect of Congressional nihilism during the Clinton years and the entire Jack Abramoff Washington apparatus during the Cheney-Bush years, I missed it. (But to say so would be so subjective and "unfair," wouldn't it? I mean, there's just nothing there to be objective about.)
Obama finds himself under fire from serious liberal eggheads as he prepares for tomorrow night's live press conference. (The TV networks aren't happy about this. It's like, "What? Again? Another one? How many more times do we have to preempt According to Jim for this junk? Good lord, you don't think he'd want on during the basketball tournament, do you?") The difference, of course, between Paul Krugman and Frank Rich is that when they criticize Obama, they do it with—you know—coherent arguments, based on what sounds an awful like serious study and thought. (Alien concepts to the party of Joe "I'm horny" Wurzelbacher.)
Rich gets off a few good lines from time to time, but there's no way he can ever compete with urging his fans to grab up a gun and starting shooting to save the country from . . . um . . . uh . . . pollution and Saudi/Iranian/Nigerian/Venezuelan oil extortion.
I'm sympathetic to what both Krugman and Rich are saying about Obama's deferential approach to the international bank disaster and what failing to set this thing back on the tracks now might do to the agenda—health care, energy, education, and the right to marry turtles—that stagnated under Republican nihilism for the past twenty years. (I just threw that "turtle" stuff in there to remind you about the time we've wasted "debating" gay marriage.)
I haven't won a Nobel Prize in Economics in a while, but I don't see how we achieve the transparency we need in this bank "bailout" scheme without nationalizing at least two or three of the bastards for a couple years and opening their books. And I'm not thrilled with the clubby, "For the Greater Glory of Goldman Sachs" vibe I'm getting from the Geithner team.
But Rich puts his finger on the worst-case reason why Obama has to pull this off . . . because if he doesn't, the Republicans, dominated by Rush Limbaugh, Joe the Plumber, Sarah Palin, and Michele Bachmann, may be taken seriously again.
So why do I love Michele? Because casual observers have no better reminder of the face-planting absurdity of modern conservatism than listening to her . . . damned near every day.
The kerfuffle over Rush Limbaugh as Putative Head of the GOP has barely died down when we are reminded that Bachmann is working off the same game plan that her party rode to pyrrhic victories with Bill Clinton's impeachment and George W. Bush's presidency. Likewise, she is a woman who has plainly studied the meteoric rise and attention accorded Sarah Palin, another good-looking gal with minimal qualitative intellect but high self-esteem and ambition.
Put simply, the time-tested strategy is: Fire-ready-aim cowboy/girl nihilism.
"They" (liberals, Obama, Barney Frank, etc.) are so bad that we "real Americans" need to think B-movie destruction. And don't get all mired down and "nuancy" about a plan to bring the cattle in off the prairie and get them to market. That "plan" stuff is for Hollywood liberals.
The New York Times's David Brooks invoked "nihilism" ("Where's za money, Lebowski?") in the aftermath of Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal's spacey "response" to Obama's address to Congress last month, and he had it about right. Between the Republican Party's well-monetized religious necromancers (who have the intellectual equivalent of wet dreams imagining God's wrathful apocalypse) and its "states' rightists" longing for legal cover to round up everyone browner than Elizabeth Hasselbeck and ship them back to Guatemala, there really aren't any adults driving the GOP buggy.
This vacuum is a wellspring of opportunity for the likes of Congresswoman Bachmann and her enablers on talk radio. (Far from expressing any level of contrition for her constant gaffes and "misstatements"—like being way down on the list of those taking earmarks —Bachmann's star only rises when she gets on with Hinderaker or Chris Baker or—has she done Michael Savage lately?
Which is why I—an unrepentant liberal—love her.
The media groupthink talking point of the moment revolves around whether Obama is biting off more than he can chew, referring to the combination of the, uh, "recession" and his plans for energy and health care reform and improved education. You expect short attention spans from the general public. But a lot of these press types followed Obama for months and listened to his stump speeches hundreds of times without apparently ever hear him talk about doing exactly what he is intent on doing now. (Maybe they were too busy Twittering to listen to what anybody was saying?)
If any of the usual media suspects mentioned how the cost of putting health care, energy, and education right is substantially higher now due to the abject neglect of Congressional nihilism during the Clinton years and the entire Jack Abramoff Washington apparatus during the Cheney-Bush years, I missed it. (But to say so would be so subjective and "unfair," wouldn't it? I mean, there's just nothing there to be objective about.)
Obama finds himself under fire from serious liberal eggheads as he prepares for tomorrow night's live press conference. (The TV networks aren't happy about this. It's like, "What? Again? Another one? How many more times do we have to preempt According to Jim for this junk? Good lord, you don't think he'd want on during the basketball tournament, do you?") The difference, of course, between Paul Krugman and Frank Rich is that when they criticize Obama, they do it with—you know—coherent arguments, based on what sounds an awful like serious study and thought. (Alien concepts to the party of Joe "I'm horny" Wurzelbacher.)
Rich gets off a few good lines from time to time, but there's no way he can ever compete with urging his fans to grab up a gun and starting shooting to save the country from . . . um . . . uh . . . pollution and Saudi/Iranian/Nigerian/Venezuelan oil extortion.
I'm sympathetic to what both Krugman and Rich are saying about Obama's deferential approach to the international bank disaster and what failing to set this thing back on the tracks now might do to the agenda—health care, energy, education, and the right to marry turtles—that stagnated under Republican nihilism for the past twenty years. (I just threw that "turtle" stuff in there to remind you about the time we've wasted "debating" gay marriage.)
I haven't won a Nobel Prize in Economics in a while, but I don't see how we achieve the transparency we need in this bank "bailout" scheme without nationalizing at least two or three of the bastards for a couple years and opening their books. And I'm not thrilled with the clubby, "For the Greater Glory of Goldman Sachs" vibe I'm getting from the Geithner team.
But Rich puts his finger on the worst-case reason why Obama has to pull this off . . . because if he doesn't, the Republicans, dominated by Rush Limbaugh, Joe the Plumber, Sarah Palin, and Michele Bachmann, may be taken seriously again.
So why do I love Michele? Because casual observers have no better reminder of the face-planting absurdity of modern conservatism than listening to her . . . damned near every day.
© 2008 MSP Communications, Inc. All rights reserved
Michele Bachmann might make good copy for Lambert or serve as an ATM for the DFL's fund-raising machine every time she opens her pie-hole. But unfortunately, for those of us in the 6th District, we have "no better reminder of the face-planting absurdity of modern conservatism" that represents us in Congress. Every day.
LAMBERT: I'm sorry for your loss. You don't say where you live in the 6th, but I'm imagining a kind of civil war between Washington and Stearns counties.
Posted by: Karl on March 24, 2009 at 6:40 AM
Makes for a great image, I'm sure it's satisfying for those of the liberal persuasion. If only it were true. You can check Powerline for an explanation of the context.
LAMBERT: Fewer people may take her seriously than take her literally, but my point is that Bachmann uses histrionic cowboy imagery because it connects with a base that has been "educated" by talk radio. More to the point, she has no point other than a self-aggrandizing fear card ... unless I missed her big energy white paper somewhere along the line.
Posted by: Henry Wolff on March 24, 2009 at 10:06 AM
What is it with wingnuts and third-rate melodrama: 24; Atlas Shrugged; the Left Behind series, and now MB seems to be channeling Red Dawn.
I hope Kevin Drum is right and Geithner is merely thinking more moves ahead than anybody else as he sets up the conditions to nationalize the big financial institutions. The core problem seems to be whether the toxic assets are simply toxic, as Krugman appears to believe, or are some merely indigestible or even just repellent? Maybe some of the people are going to continue paying the mortgages they took out on the homes they live in; it does happen. What Geithner appears to be doing is trying to figure out a way of assigning value to what Duncan Black calls "the big shit pile." Since my Nobel in economics is past the expiration date, I don't know whether the attempt will work, but it does have to be tried.
LAMBERT: I see Goldman, Sachs is saying they're going to pay back the TARP money ASAP. I hope someone asks Obama tonight if that payback includes the $12 billion from AIG, and if not, why not? I consider myself moderately well-informed on this stuff, but that pot of dough is the big symbolic cash flow I want either returned with interest or explained to complete satisfaction.
Posted by: john sherman on March 24, 2009 at 11:38 AM
Yes, Michelle is not that articulate, or perhaps even bright.
The President is a gaffe machine, another who can not be trusted to make a spontaneous remark. You've noticed that, right?
LAMBERT: No. Or are we to assert that Special Olympians can beat 129 in bowling?
Posted by: 108 on March 24, 2009 at 11:52 AM
Michelle speaks her mind, does not believe in bigger government, and has the support of her electorate, and many millions more.
Obama, well, we'll all get another dose of his teleprompter / empty suit "act" soon enough....
Can you argue the facts please, instead of the personal enmity thing?
PS: At least two Noel daughters are brunette.
LAMBERT: You had me at "speaks her mind."
Posted by: bertram jr. on March 24, 2009 at 12:21 PM
Educated by talk radio? Do you have a Bachelors Degree, by the way? Just wondering. I think there'd be some irony if you were one of those avant-garde bohemian know it alls who couldn't find the wherewithal to finish college.
Everyone I know who listens to KTLK also listens to MPR. I’d say what distinguishes us, as ‘necromancers’, is we don’t cream our pants when someone brings Richard Dawkins in as a guest.
LAMBERT: Dawkins is always good. But I prefer Sam Harris.
Posted by: 108 on March 24, 2009 at 2:06 PM
We are bringing back the carnival:
The Replace Michele Bachman Web Carnival is Back
LAMBERT: Even the guy who cleans up after the elephants thinks he's in show biz.
Posted by: Greg Laden on March 24, 2009 at 2:50 PM
Brian, I gotta say I love her more than you do. Her new hairdo is a sign of a fresh spring. Her grilling of Geithner and Bernanke was another red mark for Minnesota today. And by the way Norm Coleman thanks for getting in the way of democracy I would no longer put it past the GOP to pray for Senator Kennedy's demise so they have one more arrow in their quiver.
LAMBERT: When Grover Norquist can say "we've got 41 votes" and be confident of stopping government in its tracks you know why the GOP has poured so much dough into Norm Coleman's embarrassing fight.
Posted by: dan buechler on March 24, 2009 at 3:00 PM
You might want to bone up on Mark Levin and his new book
LAMBERT: Have you finished Joe the Plumber's book? I hear all the best conservative book clubs are atwitter.
Posted by: bertram jr. on March 24, 2009 at 3:04 PM
Norm's embarrassing fight? This is the same fight your hero Franken would be fighting if he was 500 votes behind right now, the same fight he will appeal when he eventually loses.
What's embarrassing is an election that should have been a cake walk for any DFLer, the carpet-bagger (who hasn't lived here in 40 years) B list celebrity could barley get 40%. Not exactly the 5% predicted on this blog or much of a tail wind of 300,000 votes Obama beat McCain by.
I like how lawsuits are ok for any frivolous matter or legislation until it is up against a Democrat - then lawsuits are undemocratic.
LAMBERT: You are of course referring to Bush v. Gore, i assume.
Posted by: Namzso on March 24, 2009 at 7:44 PM
Who said anything about it being undemocratic? The problem with it is that Coleman's lawyer has recognized that he will most likely lose, but plans to draw it out as long as possible anyway. As a Democrat, I am disappointed in both of them, and still would be even if things were leaning the other way. When it comes to this ridiculous circus show of a trial, you shouldn't be offended as a Republican, you should be offended as a Minnesotan.
LAMBERT: In my humble opinion Coleman, fronting for the RNC, has accomplished 60% of his mission. If Obama manages to pull off this "reconciliation" ploy and blow he filibuster threat, Normie will be super-sizing much sooner than he thought.
Posted by: Protozoa Jones on March 25, 2009 at 2:16 PM
She's a nihilist? Must be exhausting.
LAMBERT: I can get you a toe.
Posted by: justacoolcat on March 25, 2009 at 3:45 PM
Michele Bachmann is a symbol for conservative Republicans - she's stupid, devilishly pretty and kisses old men in power on the mouth - and that's they way the GOP likes their women.
Oh common, you can't tell me this isn't true!
My eyes have been wide-open for too long watching the boys of the GOP make their play for too many generations to pretend their sex play doesn't exist. Rush Limbaugh. Newt Gingrich. John Tower. Alfonso "Poker Player Alliance" D'Amato. Bob "Pecker" Packwood. Strom "Sperm" Thurmond. Rudy Giuliani. And the list goes on and on... The more conservative the Republican Party leaders are the more trophy wives they trash.
LAMBERT: I love the commenter on Talking Points Memo who referred to Michele as "the spawn of Jack "The Shining" Torrance and Kathleen Harris."
Posted by: Richard on March 26, 2009 at 9:27 AM
I love her more every new day. Read Andrew
Leonard at Salon for the latest noteworthy news from Bachmann's mouth. You gotta wonder who is funding her and if they recently made big money betting against the dollar. And that name bach mannnn no simple anderson here.
LAMBERT: What is so irresistible is that she has decided to double down on the "crazy cougar in the attic" shtick ... and it'll probably work for her. The elected version of Michelle Malkin.
Posted by: dan buechler on March 26, 2009 at 7:35 PM
The Chinese tried to kill her at the Olympics but got the wrong Minnesotans. It's all in the Beatles' song "Michelle" if you play this part backwards: "Michelle, ma belle.
Sont les mots qui vont tres bien ensemble,
Tres bien ensemble."
LAMBERT: Tres bien. Tres bien.
Posted by: Jed Leyland on March 27, 2009 at 7:59 AM