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The Hate Monger of Minnesota
A year later, Bachmann filed a police report claiming two vengeful lesbian constituents kidnapped her in a public restroom. As Bachmann’s recollections of the incident grew increasingly contradictory and hazy, the episode ballooned into a mini-scandal known in Minnesota political circles as “Bathroomgate.” The police never even investigated Bachmann’s compliant.
In 2006, with the congressional midterm elections approaching, Bachmann announced that God “called [her] to run for the United States Congress.” She easily vanquished a political neophyte, Patty Wetterling, who conducted a lackluster campaign that avoided homing in on Bachmann’s by now extensive history of gaffes. Arriving in Washington, Bachmann hired three full-time press secretaries to transform her into a national media star.
Yet the highly controversial statements continued. During a St. Cloud Times podcast in early 2007, Bachmann claimed exclusive knowledge of a secret Iranian plan to partition half of Iraq. After meeting Gov. Sarah Palin last summer in Alaska, Bachmann declared that “warmth” from a pipeline running through Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would make the area a “meeting ground and ‘coffee klatch’ for the caribou.” Just months later, during a House hearing on the mortgage foreclosure crisis engulfing her district, Bachmann read aloud from an editorial blaming “blacks and other minorities” for causing the epidemic.
Then came Bachmann’s notorious Hardball gaffe. Within days of Bachmann’s remarks, a flood of donations poured into the coffers of her Democratic opponent, Elwyn Tinklenberg, a Methodist minister and former state transportation secretary. Overnight, Tinklenberg pulled even in the polls, and the cash-strapped National Republican Congressional Committee yanked its advertising from Bachmann’s district. The NRCC’s retreat infuriated the religious right, which has promoted Bachmann with as much intensity as any female politician in recent history, even Sarah Palin.
Tony Perkins, the president of the Christian right’s leading Beltway lobbying outfit, the Family Research Council, fired off an angry letter to NRCC chairman Tom Cole, accusing him of “abandoning social conservative candidates and the issues for which they stand, particularly if they are championed by some of the most promising female legislators in the Congress.” Warren Smith, one of the evangelical right’s leading syndicated columnists, complained to me that the NRCC are “cowards” who abandoned the party’s brightest star to the ravages of the liberal media. A writer for the top-rated right-wing blog, RedState.org, echoed Smith’s grievances. “Let’s just call Tom Cole…what he is,” blogger Erik Erickson wrote. “A douchebag.”
Thrown on the defensive, Bachmann’s campaign waited three long days to respond. The unusually high attrition rate among Bachmann’s staff may have contributed to her campaign’s flatfooted reaction (10 of her original 14 congressional staffers have quit for unknown reasons). When Bachmann finally did answer the unprecedented storm of press inquiries, she issued a mea culpa. “I may not always get my words right,” Bachmann pleaded in a campaign commercial “but I know my heart is right—because my heart is for you.”
A Minnesota Public Radio poll released on October 25 provided another rebuke—Bachmann was still dead even with Tinklenberg. Even if Bachmann ekes out a victory, her difficulties in a solidly conservative district represent a repudiation of the tactics that once propelled Republicans into power across the Heartland. “Real America” is beginning to get real in a new way.
John Talks Joe
Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
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Martin Jacques is the cofounder of the UK think tank Demos, writes a regular column for The Guardian, and is a visiting research fellow at the London School of Economics Asia Research Centre. His new book, When China Rules the World, is available now.
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Christopher Buckley's books include Supreme Courtship, The White House Mess, Thank You for Smoking, Little Green Men, and Florence of Arabia. He was chief speechwriter for Vice President George H.W. Bush, and is editor-at-large of ForbesLife magazine. His new book is Losing Mum and Pup, a memoir. Buckley's Daily Beast column is the winner of an Online Journalism Award in the category of Online Commentary.
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Max Blumenthal is a senior writer for The Daily Beast, writing fellow at The Nation Institute and author of Republican Gomorrah (Basic/Nation Books). Contact him at maxblumenthal3000@yahoo.com.
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Max Blumenthal is a senior writer for The Daily Beast, writing fellow at The Nation Institute and author of Republican Gomorrah (Basic/Nation Books). Contact him at maxblumenthal3000@yahoo.com.
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Max Blumenthal is a senior writer for The Daily Beast, writing fellow at The Nation Institute and author of Republican Gomorrah (Basic/Nation Books). Contact him at maxblumenthal3000@yahoo.com.
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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