Rep. Michele Bachmann has a habit of saying some pretty crazy stuff. We might be willing to cut her some slack in that she might have misspoken, but considering the sheer volume of conspiracy theories, bald-faced lies and kookiness that comes out of her mouth, it is possible she meant what she said:
She says the Germans used "U2 boats" to sink U.S. ships during World War II. Achtung baby!
German subs were were nicknamed "U boats" because of their "U" classification by the German navy. The U-223 struck the Dorchester off Newfoundland, and it sank in less than 30 minutes. Hundreds of men died. The chaplains sacrificed their life preservers so that GIs might live.
Is anyone surprised Bachmann's mangling military history again? After all, this is the congresswoman who used the failed Charge of the Light Brigade as a rallying cry for tea party victory.
(City Pages Blotter)
The video clip (linked below) begins with statements from the President, followed by Bachmann repeating her charges of "gangster government" by the White House and the Dems in Congress.
Bachmann asserts that government intervention in the collapse of GM constitutes "gangster government." And Democratic proposals for federal regulation of Wall Street merit the adjective "gangster," criminal.
The problem of course, is that none the policies cited by Bachmann are criminal or anything close to criminal. No arrests, no indictments, no nothing--the only significance in the charge is that she insists on making it, regularly. She has been going around the country and on television to assert that laws passed by Congress with the approval of the White House amount to criminal behavior and conspiracy--that the people in the White House and in the Dem Congress are indeed criminals.
Without criminal charges against the elected officials to support the rhetoric, it's calumny and a lie. And the most weak minded extremists in the country will not care about Bachmann's silly rationalizations for the charge--all they will hear is a US Congressman telling them what many of them already believe: that the US government has been taken over by criminals, that the US government itself is outlaw.
As I've written before, this is Bachmann and her supporters putting bulleyes on the backs of the President and Democrats in Congress. The facts about right wing kooks with guns and bombs are as available to Bachmann as they are to any of us; the death threats continue to come in. It is clear that Bachmann's purpose in using the charge of gangsterism by the White House and Congressional majority is to fan the flames.
I expected more of Geraldo. (There's another sentence I never thought I'd write.)
(CONTINUED)
Rep. Michele Bachmman (R-MN) has got ideas on how to save America from Obamacare. She's going to stop those death panels and socialists from ruining America. She's apparently going to announce her very own Bachmann-care! Unfortunately, her secret plans of how to save America were leaked.
It appears that Bachmann-care won't cover anyone without health insurance or ... actually ... do much of anything at all except score her political points with the knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers who will likely mistake this for policy.
A GOP source passes along an embargoed copy of Michele Bachmann's "Declaration of Health Care Independence" - an alternative blueprint for health care that is supposed to shed the party of its "party of no" label by giving voters an option.
The declaration was circulated to GOP staffers with the prohibition, "PLEASE DO NOT SEND THIS TO ANYONE. The document is to be embargoed until after the press conference on Wednesday. Let me know if you any questions!"
The document turns out to be less than specific - mostly a litany of Bachmann's favorite pledges to fight socialized medicine and uphold the Constitution.
It makes no mention of goals articulated by many in Republican leadership, including health care portability, removal of coverage caps and scrapping coverage denial based on pre-existing conditions.
It does contain a vow to hit Democrats on three wedge issues by coaxing signees to back abortion bans, blocking benefits to undocumented immigrants and a prohibition on the public option.
(Politico)
Detailed examination of her silliness after the break.
I guess I've not been paying attention for longer than I thought. Way back on Dec. 16th, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) referenced the "Charge of the Light Brigade" regarding her and her fellow teabaggers efforts to oppose healthcare reform. If she'd only paid better attention during history class. Or maybe this is a freudian slip?
Talking Points Memo announced they are accepting nominations for their 3rd Annual Golden Duke Awards. The award is named after convicted Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham.
I think that Michele Bachmann is a serious contender in the "Meritorious Achievement in The Crazy" and "Best Public Policy-based Fib" categories. She's said and done so much in 2009. You have to send in your nominations by December 18th. Winners will be announced on December 31st.
Please send your nomination to talk at talkingpointsmemo dot com by this Friday.
It's official... it's Woodstock for teabaggers, and Michele will be there in Opryland by breakfast time:
Tea Party Nation to Host National Tea Party Convention
Opryland Hotel, Nashville, TN February 4-6th, 2010,
Keynote speaker: Sarah Palin - Governor of Alaska (2006-2009) and 2008 Republican Vice Presidential Nominee,
NASHVILLE, Tenn., Dec. 10 PRNewswire-USNewswire -- Tea Party Nation is pleased to announce the First National Tea Party Convention. The convention is aimed at bringing Tea Party representatives together from around the nation for the purpose of networking and supporting the movements' principle goals.
Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska (2006-2009) and the 2008 Republican Vice Presidential Nominee will be the guest of honor and keynote speaker.
Rep. Michele Bachmann will be a breakfast speaker at the convention. Also speaking at the convention are Rep. Marsha Blackburn and former Alabama Supreme Court Judge Roy Moore. (Editor's note: lots of other notable wingers on the guest list, too. Continued below:)
Here is another video of Michele Bachmann I put together over the last couple of days.
If you're reading this, I know you know who she is...but how many of you know that she's claimed to be in receipt of prophetic visions and divine instructions from God? And that there's video of her claiming this?
Here is Michele sharing testimony for Jesus Christ at the Living Word Christian Center in church during her first campaign for Congress. She's speaking to fellow evangelicals.
Last night on the Sean Hannity Show, Michele Bachmann asked Americans to join her on a march into the United States Capitol to protest the proposed health care reform bill. That's right, and open invitation to a national audience to show up on the Capitol steps, on Thursday at "high noon," Washington D.C. time. Michele hopes that a mob will invade the halls of Congress and make their opposition known to her elected colleagues. (You can see the video below, in the post.)
This would be a big score for Michele personally, if a large number of the tea baggers and the town hall meeting screechers take her up on this invitation. Very good video, from Michele's point of view--because she's nuts and thrives on proto-fascism.
Now there are some issues here. First of all--we (you, me, Michele) live in a representative democracy. There are instances in which Americans opposed to a government policy show up at the capitol to protest that policy. But here we have an elected official going on television to organize a mob of her own in order to influence the course of legislation by intimidating her colleagues.
In the proto-fascist universe of this elected official, it's okay to do that--to organize a mob to intimidate your colleagues in office into doing your will.
(Keep reading after the jump and watch the video, this is good stuff, classic crazy extremist Bachmann...continued)
They're former Republican Senate Majority Leaders, former heroes of Bachmann's conservative GOP--but they were too "non-pro-freedom" for Michele...
So under the bus they go! "Non-pro-freedom" is the latest convolution I've heard from Bachmann. I guess that's something like "anti-freedom" or "soft on the freedom thing."
Who would have thought that? Bob Dole, losing an arm fighting for the forces of "non-pro-freedom" in WWII. Bill Frist, an evangelical voter's darling who fought to keep Terry Schiavo alive by diagnosing her via television--a "non-pro-freedom" candidate.
Their real sin, if you pay attention to Laura Ingraham's interview with Bachmann, is that they lost their respective elections. That is apparently how you tell a "non-pro-freedom" Republican from a real one. Bachmann's loyalty to fellow Republicans runs as deep as a Pravda editorial policy.
There's a congressional race going on up in upstate New York. I'm doing it as a Bachmann item because:
1) Bachmann's chimed in on it
2) in the last 24 hours, political pundit EJ Dionne has identified this race as one of those "bellwether" events that tells us what's going on in the national GOP and the GOP rank-and-file
and
3) Dionne cites an astonishing poll result at the end of his piece.
Let's start with the astonishing poll result. Buried at the bottom of Dionne's piece is this:
(The national Republican party)is getting to be a small, comfy group. The Washington Post-ABC News poll this week found that only 20 percent of adults identify themselves as Republicans, the lowest single number in Post-ABC polls since 1983. Only 19 percent had confidence in congressional Republicans "to make the right decisions for the country's future." Even congressional Democrats got 34 percent on that question, and Obama scored 49 percent.
After a summer of rabid teabagging and shouting down and threatening at health reform town halls, after nearly a year of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and Michele Bachmann making non-stop broadcast of conspiracy allegations against Obama and the Democrats--only twenty per cent of Americans polled are willing to identify themselves as Republicans. (continued)
Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) went off on a rant against former Senators Bob Dole and Bill Frist today on Laura Ingraham's radio show. Bachmann lives in an over-simplified black/white, good/evil world and seems incapable of understanding anything that doesn't easily fit into her worldview. For example, it doesn't make any sense in her small world that a Republican would want healthcare reform.
Dole and Frist aren't ready to slit their wrists in any pacts with Bachmann to oppose any kind of healthcare reform. This makes her very, very confused. Since they don't agree with her completely, they must be bad and/or wrong.
INGRAHAM: Of course. God bless Bob Dole he just came on our show, I have great respect for the man. And also for Frist. But Frist presided over a pretty disastrous situation in the Senate.
BACHMANN: They lost.
INGRAHAM: They lost. And Bob Dole lost how many times on a national level? I guess I've lost count. [...] That Republican ideology and that Republican outlook has been a losing outlook. That's why President Obama wants more of us to be like them.
BACHMANN: Because we want a pro-freedom agenda. And he's trying to throw people around who he believes will increase a non-pro-freedom agenda.
The name of the youth ministry is You Can Run But You Can't Hide (YCRBYCH). Their spokesman is Bradlee Dean. They go to public schools to witness for Jesus, and they apparently do that without telling school officials that that's what they are going to do once they get on school grounds. (YCRBYCH has presented itself to school officials an anti-drug message show, not a "Christian witnessing in the schools" outfit.)
But it's not just evangelical Christianity. It's a political thing. YCRBYCH has a syndicated radio showing starring Dean, and it broadcasts locally. The Minnesota Independent reports some of the things that Bradlee Dean told listeners on his show.
"(Barack Obama's) un-American, he's not American, he's unpatriotic to the max."
On Aug. 1, Dean recited an open letter from the White House: "Truth be told with each passing day more and more Americans are unable to get the health care they need," he read. To that, Dean added, "In other words, Obama is saying, 'I can give it to you, who's yo daddy?'"
A good article from the Boston Globe describes how the census became an obsession for conspiracy theorists around the country.
Our own Michele Bachmann rates a paragraph:
Over the summer, Representative Michele Bachmann, a Republican from Minnesota, provided possible recourse, declaring a kind of info-blockade. In June, she told the Washington Times that she planned to answer only the first question on the 2010 form, which asks how many people live at your address. Bachmann claimed, incorrectly, that the Constitution authorized the Census to count people and nothing more. The other queries, she said, were overly intrusive. Later, during an interview with Fox News's Glenn Beck - who has taken up census concerns as a favorite story - she mentioned that it was census data that aided the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
But the evil genius behind the census, according to the right wingers quoted in the article, is none other than Barack Obama. (continued)
We lead with this item from a Republican blog. I am regularly asked--how can this kook be accepted as a conservative spokesman by the trad media and the GOP rank and file. Every so often, we must put on the glasses with Republican prism lenses and see how conservatives view this individual we long ago wrote off as a dangerous kook.
So here we go. Hold on to your brains, because there's O'Reilly video, too. From a blog called GOP 12: (continued)
Talking Points Memo announced they are accepting nominations for their 
