Her most hilarious accomplishment was being named to the
House Intelligence Committee.
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| For more cartoons by R.J. Matson, click here. |
By Donald Kaul
It looks as though we
jackals of the “lamestream media” won’t have Michele Bachmann to kick around
anymore.
With just a hint of
Nixonian rancor in her voice, she announced — via a lengthy YouTube rant in the
middle of the night a short while ago — she would not seek reelection to the
U.S. House of Representatives. More’s the pity.
Bachmann is a master
of the political theater of the absurd and a reliable source of mirth who
provides a wealth of grist for the media’s ridicule mill. At every opportunity,
she shoots off wild statements in every direction — not caring much about their
accuracy or where they land.
“There are hundreds
and hundreds of scientists, many of them Nobel Prize winners, who believe in
intelligent design,” she said. (Actually, the number of credentialed scientists
who believe in intelligent design would fit in a broom closet, and if any of
them have a Nobel Prize, I haven’t heard of them.)
She can be
mean-spirited, I’ll grant you that. She accused former Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton’s aide, Huma Abedin, of having close ties with the Muslim
Brotherhood. (She didn’t). And she used a broad brush when it came to painting
opponents un-American. (They weren’t).
She saw fascism in
Obama’s health care plan and an apocalypse in vaccinating children against
disease.
OK, so maybe all of
that isn’t so funny. But how about seeing the Broadway Show “The Lion King” as
gay propaganda because, she said, it was written by a gay guy? Or finding
“commonality” between the war zone in Iraq and the Mall of America? Or
suggesting that Glenn Beck could
resolve the national debt snafu if we only “gave him the numbers”?
She became the first
card-carrying dingbat to launch a major presidential bid. To me, her
greatest and most hilarious accomplishment was being named to the House
Intelligence Committee. Who says House Speaker John Boehner doesn’t have a
sense of humor?
To paraphrase a
humorous, self-deprecating speech made by South Dakota Democrat George McGovern
after he’d lost the 1972 election to Richard Nixon: She wanted to run for
president in the worst way, and so she did.
Her ill-fated White
House campaign should have used the slogan — “Smarter than Rick Perry, prettier
than Newt Gingrich.” It would have been as close to the truth as anything in
that train wreck — which is now under federal
and state investigations.
The Republican Party
has arrived at a curious moment, when it is possible for someone who doesn’t
know anything about anything — science, government, economics (think Sarah
Palin) — to be taken seriously as a national leader by the elders of the party.
In Virginia, we’ve
just witnessed a Republican primary that nominated a black man, E.W. Jackson,
for lieutenant governor. Good for them, you might say. About time, you might
say.
Except that Jackson
believes that homosexuality is a mental disease — akin to, if not the same as,
pedophilia. He says that Planned Parenthood has been more lethal to blacks than
the KKK and that President Barack Obama sees the world from a Muslim
perspective.
That kind of black
man.
All you have to do to
win over Republicans these days is to shoot your mouth off in a fashion that
impresses the party’s knuckle-dragging ignoramuses. Even worse, to fail to do
so can be politically lethal.
I don’t mean to come
off as a know-it-all. I make mistakes. As a matter of fact, I made one just the
other day.
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| Jeannette Rankin - NOT a Bachman role model |
I wrote that Jeannette
Rankin, the pacifist lawmaker who voted against both World Wars in the House of
Representatives, was from Missouri. She was not. She was from Montana.
I can explain. I had
thought she was from North Dakota, but I looked it up and saw it was Montana.
So I went back to my computer and wrote “Missouri.”
It could have happened
to anyone.
Well, maybe not
anyone, but it could have happened to Michele Bachmann, who once mixed up the
Iowa birthplaces of actor John Wayne and serial killer John Wayne Gacy. I
apologize to Jeannette Rankin fans.
OtherWords columnist
Donald Kaul lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. OtherWords.org