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The Hate Monger of Minnesota
How a Minnesota congresswoman became a poster child for the GOP crack-up.
Rep. Michele Bachmann, a Republican from Minnesota, is now notorious for an incident on the October 17 edition of Hardball. Bachmann told Chris Matthews she was “concerned” that Obama “may have anti-American views,” and linked him to a Who’s Who of leftist agitators, from William Ayers to Saul Alinsky to Ward Churchill. “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?” Bachmann said.
Bachmann’s comments were an extreme example of McCain-Palin campaign’s closing theme: “Real America” and the “the pro-American parts of America” against nebulous socialist elites who “pal around with terrorists.” The once reliable tactic backfired in dramatic fashion, jeopardizing Bachmann’s reelection in what was once one of the country’s safest Republican districts. Bachmann is now the poster child of her party’s mounting political woes.
In 2005, while serving in the Minnesota state senate, Bachmann crept surreptitiously to the perimeter of a protest against a bill banning same-sex marriage. She ducked behind a bush, and for several minutes, Bachmann and a staffer observed the rally like spies.
While Bachmann’s gaffe startled pundits, a review of her political career shows she has a habit of unusual behavior and inflammatory statements. The fact that she has gotten away with it owes to her relative obscurity and her protection from religious conservatives. “Bachmann was an accident waiting to happen,” Steve Perry, the editorial director of the left-learning political news website, The Minnesota Independent, told me. “With no expertise in secular matters, she was caught between an enormous desire for attention and a well justified interest in repelling scrutiny.”
In 2005, while serving in the Minnesota state senate, Bachmann crept surreptitiously to the perimeter of a protest against a bill banning same-sex marriage. She ducked behind a bush, and for several minutes, Bachmann and a staffer observed the rally like spies. When a demonstrator approached the half-hidden Bachmann with a camera in hand, she scurried away, jumped in an SUV, and bolted from the scene.
Bachmann justified her behavior as an outgrowth of her religious convictions. She explained to a local mega-church audience soon after the incident: “For 34 years, I’ve been hot! And you want to be hot! Because when you are hot for Jesus Christ, there is nothing that is like that life!”
Michele Bachmann’s evangelical convictions emerged after meeting her future husband, Marcus, a born-again activist who worked with her on Jimmy Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign. They married after Michele earned her law degree from Oral Roberts University. “I thought to myself, Oooh. I don’t even like this guy,” Michele reflected before worshippers at a megachurch. “And he thought, ‘Oooh, I’m 22. I don’t want to get married. I don’t think I even like her…’ And so we obeyed God and we honored Him in our relationship. And pretty soon some romantic things started happening. And then we got married.” While his wife’s conservative political activities intensified, Marcus stayed behind the scenes, setting homosexuals on the straight path at his “Christian counseling” center. Besides their five sons and daughters, the Bachmanns have raised 23 foster children.
Michele Bachmann entered local politics during the early 1990’s through EdWatch, a right-wing group in Minnesota that vowed to remake the country’s “entire education system.” She founded a publicly funded Christian charter school where creationism was taught in biology classes and, according to the Minneapolis City Pages, students were forbidden from viewing the Disney movie Aladdin because it supposedly contained anti-Christian themes. After spearheading a failed right-wing takeover attempt of the Stillwater, Minnesota, school board, Bachmann won a state senate seat in 2000 with the backing of several churches in her district.
Bachmann shunned most mainstream reporters upon entering office, opting instead for regular spots on right-wing radio. In 2004, Bachmann made a series of appearances on the radio show of Jan Markell, a self-proclaimed “Jew for Jesus,” attempting to rally supporters in favor of a federal ban on same-sex marriage. “This is a very serious matter,” Bachmann proclaimed on Markel’s show in 2004, “because it is our children who are the prize for this [gay] community, they are specifically targeting our children.”
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Oh My...this woman has no place in public office. I think should get back in her time machine and head back to the dark ages. I really fear for our young women who have to listen to people like this. It's really unfair to our young (and old) to be abused by dipshtiz like Bachmann. God help us.
And PLEASE take Elizabeth Hasselback with her!! They are both SOOOO "Prickly" & Irritating"! I can't believe these women are allowed to speak in public!
What always troubles me about these wackos, is that some of the policies they embrace may not be so bad afterall, but because they are connected to them, they immediately get the stench of extremism. I am referring to the pipeline, which may not be a warm snuggly coffee klatch for caribou but could be useful and perhaps not so stressful on wildlife as other invasions of the wilderness.
throw her under the bus back it up and run her over again...her comments reek of macarthyism...man i hope she gets kicked out of office
Yet another example of how we need to immediately introduce FREE and MANDATORY critical thinking clinics across America. I've been watching this woman practice her "punditry" all year, just knowing that she was exactly the accident waiting to happne.
Bachmann is scary and hopefully not re-elected. Her religious extremism has no place in Congress. Mercifully articles like this expose the pattern of her abuse, not just the most recent remark that got her into trouble. Like Pat Roberts who makes ludicrously weird statements and then retracts them, Bachman has fallen on her sword over the most recent gaffe, but the public is smarter than that. It's the pattern of her remarks/beliefs that make her TOXIC. Minnesotans, please don't re-elect her.
when all this broke I posted a version of this on HuffPost.
I'm glad the conversation is still raging against this person and her ilk.
"...and how will we know 'em? Rep. Michele?
Will they have 'Star of David's' sewn into their lapels?
Pink triangles on their arm?
or perhaps we only go after the ones wearing a crescent moon?
How 'bout the ones who sink?
By what criterion shall we judge?
The ones who agree with YOU?
or the ones who agree with ME?
I'm guessing that when we replace Dick with Sarah she'll have the witch hunters out after 'em! That's it, and then we can have Alaska secede from the union so we use it for an extraordinary rendition colony 'till they are rehabilitated.
Gee, that's cool, it even LOOKS like Siberia up there!
But then what do we do with them?
Once they are 'proven' to be 'Anti-America' and sent to the camps, you can't really let them back in, if you let them slither back into the social fabric, they might run for President! can't have that!
May as well just round 'em all up and gas them NOW!
I must say, kudos to Chris Mathews for drawing her out on this but as I sat watching, slack-jawed, I felt very sad for our country. So many of us have taken such pride in our native son, Barack, and the progress we have made as a nation in rising up beyond such petty thinking as this Congresswoman represents. The only weapon we have right now is 'HOPE'. Hope that in a couple of weeks (now, just a week) we can signal a new era in our society, where the voices of such small, regressive thinkers are drowned out by the machinery of progress.
As a foster parent myself, the most scary thing to me is that she was allowed 23 foster children. As if they hadn't had enough problems already!!!
Bachmann deserves to lose. I watched, my chin on my chest, her lash out on Hardball a couple weeks ago. The following week, I went online and gave her opponent $100. That was fun. Michelle Bachmann and her ilk are on their way out.
Tony Perkins considers this woman to be "[one] of the most promising female legislators in the Congress"?
And people pay this man for his political acuity?
What a great year this is to be a liberal.
The woman is awful, no question, but the column is marred by Mr. Blumenthal's inability to get her opponent's name right. It's Tinklenberg, not Tinkelberg. Hire a fact checker.
Bathroomgate? What is it with conservative Republicans in bathrooms in Minnesota?
Bachmann's fascism is a real danger to our democracy. Unfortunately this fascism is now running the republican party and attracts mental misfits like Bachmann and those akin to ones seen on Jon Stewart on 10/27/08.
Esmeralda, I couldn't agree with you more!
I cannot stand Elizabeth Hasselback!!!! She is so out of touch with how "real"people live, exactly like the candidate she so vehemently supports.
If Ms. Bachmann is one of the GOP's "brightest stars", then I foresee a long time in the wilderness for the party of Lincoln. Hopefully, it will learn from the excesses of kooks and become a stronger party for it.
Religious fanaticism is the most dangerous thing facing our country or any country where ignorance and hate have taken over. Fanaticism can't compete with common sense and reason. Hyperreligiousity is usually considered a sign of a mental illness and, once people go down this road, there is rarely a return to rationality.
This woman can at best be described as venomous and consumed with hatred which it colors everything she does and says. She is certainly a good advertisement for a good idea, religion, taken to ridiculous extremes. I find it amazing how the religious nut cases who want to turn the U.S. into a 17th Century theocracy use religion to justify being a bunch of hatemongering sexist bigots and say its okay because they're doing "God's work". What could be more twisted!
The history of Christianity is sordid at best, being driven by money and power, and murderous at it's worst. Religion is a concept that has been perverted and it could use a reworking if humanity is not to suffer anymore from those who are just doing "God's work" whatever their religious persuasion.
This woman is living proof of how flawed it is. And, she's a lawyer on top of it. Two evils in one body!
She's a complete horror. It makes me sad to think of what the Republican party, and what the Christian "moral majority" has made of itself. I'm a Christian to my core, but don't stand with Bachman or Palin in their 'slash and burn' conservativism. Too often the only value that Christians (evangelicals in particular) consider important enough to decide their vote is the pro-life issue, while the very issues that create the lack of educational opportunities and fairness that create abortions go unchecked. Christians should also care about creation, economic and social justice, and the good of his fellow man, in addition to lowering of abortions across the map.
What's scary is that she makes these insidious and inflammatory statements with a smile on her face!
I am so glad she is a republican...I hope they make her chairwoman of the party....
Bachmann's a nut but reading from Investors Business Daily or criticizing the CRA's push to relax lending standards to increase home ownership among low income Americans and minorities does not make you a racist or mean you are "blaming minorities" for the crash. She may or may not be a racist, but making the charge based on the fact that she read aloud from the Investors Business Daily article doesn't prove anything. Throwing out the racism charge when anyone is critical of a program that benefits minority groups (even when the program is flawed or mismanaged) is just shallow.
I think I am going to dress up as as Michele Bachman this year, or Lindsay Graham. Not Rove again this year, that's for sure. Maybe Rick Davis? NO, definitely Bachman!
OOoh, it's getting scary! Like some political Poe!
Happy Halloween!
Quoth the Maverick...
http://thetruthburns.wordpress.com/2008/10/28/quoth-the-maverick/
Dress up for Halloween that is, not just for kicks! ;)
Hallooooo, Michele!!
Intersting the similarities amongst Bachmann, Palin, and Hasselbeck... and interesting that Republicans want these sorts of women as spokeepeople/role models.
I've said it before but I'll say it here... tie her up and throw her overboard.
"free and mandatory critical thinking clinics across America?" !!!!!!!!!!! I adore it!
Yay for people showing their true colors! Man, something even Republican campaigners won't even touch.
Thank you.
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