Hell's Barbie

There is no chance that Michele Bachmann can be elected President of the US. But then again, I thought the same thing about George W. Bush. Surely, this country can't get any dumber than Bush ... can it?


Michele Bachmann, hell's Barbie

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, June 29, 2011



Meanwhile, while you were sleeping, while you were allowing your attention to wander to issues more pressing, heartwarming and good, such as gay New Yorkers in love and goofy dogs running marathons, easily the most insane and wide-eyed squirrelmonkey pseudo-politician in your lifetime announced that she is hereby running for president of the United States.

And by "running" she does not mean putting on those supercute little silver jogging shoes with the funny blinky LED lights in the heels that she saw at DSW that one time, because that would be silly and not make any sense at all, and she wants people to understand she is very serious about this campaign thing and is definitely not as totally loopy bats--t crazy as your demented Aunt Sylvia with the twitchy eye, 23 parakeets and the addiction to little tubes of Oscar Meyer bologna wrapped around a fistful of oxycodone.

Except, of course, that she totally is.

Yes, Michele Bachmann is running for president. Michele Bachmann, fundamentalist Christian zealot, paranoid isolationist, lowbrow conspiracy theorist, heavily shellacked automaton, anti-choice anti-gay anti-everything neo-Stepford throwback and easily the flat-out nuttiest female ever to raise a hugely depressing $13 million for her clumsy campaign launch, Michele wants to lead us all to salvation.

Well OK, not all of us exactly, mostly the whites and the rich and people who collect colorful black-light posters featuring sweaty, bare-chested Jesus riding a T-Rex into the Castro to smite the gays. But you know, that's nitpicking.

And why? Why on earth is she running? Because apparently certain key GOP advisers were partially sober just long enough to tell her, well, not that she actually has a shot, not that she can possibly make it past the second round of debates without imploding, but that she could, you know, "change the conversation."

That's just an educated guess, by the way, because "you can change the conversation" is basically shorthand for "score big points with your rabid constituents," "make national headlines you'd never make otherwise," "suck in piles of money from the freaky old Koch brothers," and "maybe, just maybe become the next Sarah Palin, who herself isn't really Sarah Palin anymore, given how numb the country has become to her endless malapropisms and embarrassing public moments, thus leaving a huge opening for someone even more dangerously bizarre to step in and mortify the human race." Thanks, Minnesota!

That Bachmann can now reference God and Jesus more times than Sarah Palin can reference mama grizzlies and Paul Revere? That she could half-heartedly represent the Tea Party in all its ragged, nonsensical, Coors Light-filled, garage band glory? That she can now espouse any one of her laundry list of bizarro claims, including (but far from limited to) the idea that AmeriCorps is a government brainwashing program, that Michelle Obama wants to force all women to breast feed, Sharia law is coming to middle America, Creationism is fact, global warming is a hoax, the Treasury has a secret plan to create a "one world" currency, health care reform will send kids on "abortion field trips," and that Obama might use new census data to round up Americans and put them in camps? Baby, that's just for starters.

But let this not solely be a column detailing the well-documented and -- let's just admit it -- hugely entertaining insanity of Michele Bachmann. I don't nearly have the space, and Matt Taibbi's fantastic Rolling Stone piece, combined with Mother Jones' disturbing three-page list of assorted Bachmann bombs, does a far better job of cataloguing her big box of crazy than I ever could.

Let us instead pause for a moment as we offer wayward and sidelong thanks to ... Hillary Clinton.
You read that right. For without Hillary, there would be no Michele. Without Hillary to pave the way for all shapes and IQs of women to follow her lead, well, Bachmann would still be cruising the wealthy suburbs of Minnesota, hurling Bibles at terrified children from the trunk of her pink Lexus.

Let us briefly recall all those lifetimes ago -- going on four years now -- when Hillary was in top form as presidential candidate, when all the talk surrounded whether or not America was possibly ready for a female president and everyone was all aflutter over the notion that an enormously intelligent, capable woman was finally about to shatter the last political glass ceiling.

Well, Hillary did it. She might not have won, but she certainly made it far enough that no one is batting an eye that Bachmann is (well, questionably) female. No one is flinching at the idea that a woman could run a successful campaign, be a serious candidate, possibly win the big prize.

In fact, so successful was Hillary in cementing this truism in the American consciousness, it's essentially negating the collective, agonized scream of all former Hillary supporters, all the feminists, pro-choicers, intelligent and empowered humans everywhere who are right now looking at Bachmann -- the monstrous, reverso-world embodiment of everything Hillary is not -- and going, "Oh sweet Jesus no, this is not what we meant at all."

Regardless, perhaps it is time for celebration. I know plenty of liberals -- myself included -- who were completely delighted to hear Bachmann declare her candidacy. Despite the dour alarmist bells sounded by a few pundits who think there's a very slim chance Bachmann could actually be a threat, her announcement pretty much guarantees the GOP race will be nothing short of a hilarious madcap clown car slugfest, with Jesus.

And if Newt Gingrich manages to stay afloat and Ron Paul and perhaps even Palin herself gets in there, and someone asks if Jesus is gay, gold should be the only valid currency or whether or not God can take Allah in a Wrestlemania grudge match? Let's just say, history will be made.

What's more, if all goes well, if the Bachmann Express does what it's expected to do and makes easy mockery of the last iotas of human intelligence the GOP has left, her campaign -- already off to a cringing start when she confused John Wayne the actor with John Wayne Gacy the serial killer -- could easily spell the end of the Tea Party once and for all. Bonus.

No matter how you slice it, it's guaranteed to be a stretch of political theater so wonderfully absurd and surreal, so brazenly insulting to history, grammar, science, logic, sexuality, common sense, gender and fundamental human progress itself, well, you'd have to be crazy not to watch it.

Original.