Pat Oliphant displayed it quite well in his 1 July 2011 comment.
Rolling Stone used a longer, wider format:
“Bachmann's story, to hear her tell it, is about a suburban homemaker who is chosen by God to become a politician who will restore faith and family values to public life and do battle with secular humanism. But by the time you've finished reviewing her record of lies and embellishments and contradictions, you'll have no idea if she actually believes in her own divine inspiration, or whether it's a big con job. Or maybe both are true — in which case this hard-charging challenger for the GOP nomination is a rare breed of political psychopath, equal parts crazed Divine Wind kamikaze-for-Jesus and calculating, six-faced Machiavellian prevaricator. Whatever she is, she's no joke.”
Concerning her law education at what is now “Regent University School of Law.”
“Yes, this was the tiny educational outhouse that, despite being the 136th-ranked law school in the country, where 60 percent of graduates flunked the bar, produced a flood of entrants into the Bush Justice Department.
“Regent was unabashed in its desire that its graduates enter government and become "change agents" who would help bring the law more in line with "eternal principles of justice," i.e., biblical morality. To that end, Bachmann was mentored by a crackpot Christian extremist professor named John Eidsmoe, a frequent contributor to John Birch Society publications who once opined that he could imagine Jesus carrying an M16 and who spent considerable space in one of his books musing about the feasibility of criminalizing blasphemy.”
“ But consider this possibility: She wins Iowa, then swallows the Tea Party and Christian vote whole for the next 30 or 40 primaries while Romney and Pawlenty battle fiercely over who is the more "viable" boring-white-guy candidate. Then Wall Street blows up again — and it's Barack Obama and a soaring unemployment rate versus a white, God-fearing mother of 28 from the heartland.
It could happen. Michele Bachmann has found the flaw in the American Death Star. She is a television camera's dream, a threat to do or say something insane at any time, the ultimate reality-show protagonist. She has brilliantly piloted a media system that is incapable of averting its eyes from a story, riding that attention to an easy conquest of an overeducated cultural elite from both parties that is far too full of itself to understand the price of its contemptuous laughter. All of those people out there aren't voting for Michele Bachmann. They're voting against us. And to them, it turns out, we suck enough to make anyone a contender.
Cassi Creek: Like Palin, Bachman believes she has been directly anointed by a supreme being to change the democratic republic forged in freedom from state religion into a theocracy based upon her interpretation of how civil law should be submerged into canon law. Also like Palin, she wants to make it mandatory for everyone to be subject to her religion’s tenets.
And like Palin, she has no concern for veracity in her use of what she claims to be fact. Fiction, political fiction, is a better term for the misinformation she spouts.
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The conclusion that her supporters take derision and scorn directed to Bachman (&/or Palin) as personal insults to those same supporters bears keeping in mind. There has been more use of the term “class warfare” this year than I’ve heard in many years. The brutal division between red and blue states carries over into the voter base.
The risk of theocracy if American Christians are left unchecked to meddle in politics and force their evangelical and fundamentalist cultural, social, and political agendas into our daily lives and into our civil legal mechanisms is far greater than many people will recognize. Those of us who choose to avoid governance by theocracy have begun making our positions known. Essentially this is taking place by using the courts to enforce the 1st amendment’s establishment clause. By objecting to religious ceremonies and actions at public and civic events, by preventing such displays at public meetings, at public school events, etc., we hope to avoid the takeover of the public sphere by evangelicals and fundamentalists.
What we see as preservation of our 1st amendment rights is seen by evangelicals, teavangelists, as persecution of Christians by preventing them from unrestrained public prayer woven into the fabric of daily life. How a majority of professed Christians can be persecuted by small minorities is one of those masterful lies dreamed up by the GOP and teavangelist PR machine. They are quite willing to advance this lie, “persecution of Christians” whenever they can advance their political stance. Thus, the desire of non-Christians to avoid continual public prayer and laws driven by Christian dogma becomes a highly divisive matter.
At the same time, the teavangelist base is highly agitated by the presence of Muslims in American life. They have introduced local, state, and federal attempt to outlaw the practice of Islam in America. Yet objections to such bigotry and hatred driven behavior by non-Christians is, again, called persecution of Christians by those who fail to acknowledge their own bigotry as persecution.
The same divisive and potentially violent partitions in our culture and politics occur over the topics of abortion, immigration, taxation, education, gun control, use of recreational drugs, and other hot button concerns. There is a class war developing in this nation and it is driven by the GOP /teavangelists and their financial backers. Lacking the honesty to admit their intent to beggar the middle class, they hire propaganda firms to fuel the division between north and south, rural and urban, educated and dropout, red and blue.
Bachman is the perfect tool for them to use against what was once a much more cohesive nation. The objections to Bachman that we voice bounce around in reflection and add anger-driven votes to her count. In our recognition of her unsuitability are the seeds of our loss.
Canada’s looking good these days, fewer people by far and fewer crazies.
Shabbat Shalom
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