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George Will puffs Michele Bachmann--nationally.

by: Bill Prendergast

Sat Oct 24, 2009 at 12:19:45 PM CDT

Bachmann's big. If she ever manages to get on a national ticket, she's got tens of millions of voters at her beck and call via the evangelical right promotion. Conservative pundit George Will is just late to get up to speed on what's happened. But now Will's doing the puffing, too--another sign that she's winning, the strategy is working.

Everything positive that's in Will's piece could have been fed to him straight from the Bachmann campaign itself. It's right out her personal statements to the press for the last four years, re-printed by Will.

There's a weird "typo" in the promo for the piece, too. Look at this:

The Bachmann burr

By George Will
Some of Marcus Bachmann's supposed excesses are not merely defensible, they are admirable.

I don't know who writes these promos to direct readers to the theme of Will's columns. But that's a hell of a typo. Marcus Bachmann is, of course, Michele's husband and sometime political guru. But it's as if Will or his editor wrote a headline to a column about Ronald Reagan: "The right has a new champion, and it's Nancy Reagan--uh, I mean Ronald Reagan."(continued)

Bill Prendergast :: George Will puffs Michele Bachmann--nationally.

So this is a Bachmann "commercial," basically, and George Will simply re-typed the copy that the Bachmanns gave him for the commercial.

He does allude to Michele's "investigate Congress for anti-Americans" suggestion, but he present that as one of her 'cute little lapses, heh heh,' in a larger context of admirable grass-roots politicking.

George Will, mocking the notion that she's part of a "vast, right wing conspiracy"--omitting the fact that she's been mentored by the national evangelical right since her days in the Minnesota State House. George Will, telling the story of how Michele was miraculously nominated at a Republican political event after a "five minute speech" on freedom. George Will, failing to say that the reason that Bachmann won that GOP nomination was that she brought enough of her personal religious followers to the GOP to swamp the regular Republican volunteers in the voting.

I've been Bachmann-watching for at least seven years now. If you go through Will's piece, you will see him reprint actual phrases that the Bachmanns have been circulating as part of their "for the press" legend for years. He re-prints that Bachmann press package propaganda, as if it were "news," a Bachmann exclusive for this conservative pundit god.

Go ahead, Google some of the imagery in Will's column with Bachmann's name in the search: you will find reporters repeating the same Bachmann propaganda, uncritically, for years on end. And it's not just conservatives doing that, either. Bachmann claims never got a serious examination in a Minnesota daily, not in nine years of a political career representing Minnesotans. Even though she's been exposed as a liar, time and time and time again--the original bullshit in the press package contines to be circulated as unquestioned gospel.

For example--Will says she "raised" 23 foster children. (She says that too, but sometimes she says something else about the time those people spent at her home.) Really? She "raised" 23 foster children? From cradle to age 18?

Here's the link. Hat tip to my brother in law.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

Tags: bizarro world hypocrisy, Michele Bachmann, (All Tags)

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George Will puffs Michele Bachmann--nationally. | 2 comments

George Will's career (0.00 / 0)

as a sorry, predictable establishment mouthpiece is reaching its twilight with, not the unending conservative dominance he, and Karl Rove, envisioned, but with seeing everything he believes circling the flush-hole.

Is anyone talking about the late Robert Novak now? William Safire? As yet another dreary, interchangeable right-wing hack, Will's work, despite his pretensions, will have no more enduring significance than theirs, because not a word he's ever written deserves it.

'Conservative' and 'intellectual' are as mutually exclusive as any two terms can possibly be.

by: dan.burns @ Sat Oct 24, 2009 at 13:05:16 PM CDT

Unfortunately, dan (0.00 / 0)

...George Will doesn't care what you or I or anyone else thinks of him. He's a shameless pimp, not an independent minded columnist who uses objective standards to judge fitness for office or leadership.

And he's a very well paid pimp, so he doesn't care about the job he does or what happens to his readers. That's why he'll back a nut as "hero of the moment" for the GOP and conservative movement.

The last time I can ever recall Will showing any independence or spine was when he called on Nixon to resign.
Since then, he's regularly endorsed people who happened to be ahead in the conservative movement at the moment. At one point he was out in the cold for denouncing Bush senior as a lapdog, but he was ever willing to eat s--t on that one when as Bushes came into power.

The only reason Will is important is that newspaper publishers and editors still consider him to be a "respectable" face of conservatism. Even other conservatives don't view him as a leader or trusted ideologue these days. But for the corporate media he's "grandfathered in" as a pundit, even when he's reduced to puffing an outright nut.

by: Bill Prendergast @ Sat Oct 24, 2009 at 16:15:34 PM CDT

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