Michelle, my belle!
What can one say about a fifty something moderately attractive woman who is arguably crazy as hell? Actually, quite a bit.
Michelle Bachmann has decided to leave the House of Representatives and that is, in some ways, a good thing. However, in other ways, it may not be such a good thing. As one of my former wives was known to say: you can always do worse! Bachmann’s leaving public politics is not going to change the way so many of the people that she represents think about life and the state of this nation as we meander further through the twenty first century. Bob Dole, the former Republican candidate for president in 1996 recently stated on one of the Sunday morning talk shows that the Republican party should put out a “closed for repairs” sign for the next few months while it tries to reestablish some link to mainstream America that might allow it to field and elect a candidate for president of these United States. That statement both shows how in touch Dole is politically and, at the same time, paradoxically, just how out of though he is in his nineties with the current American scene. Dole, an old moderate Republican, actually thinks that repairs might be possible. He is a dying breed representative of the greatest generation and in no way reflects what the current crop of tea partiers thinks.
We are in a mess as a nation and people like Michelle Bachmann and the recently defeated Florida firebrand Republican congressman Allan West represent a goodly part of that mess. West has made so many statements that are patently goofy that we cannot even begin to delve into them. He once stated that he knew that around eighty members of the democrat congressional delegation were card carrying communists in an age when communism is passé. And Bachmann recently stated that there was a relationship between one of the scandals facing the Obama administration and the possibility that same administration might try to deny health coverage under Obamacare to those that it has disagreed with politically.
These are outrageous statements but they do not stop there. Bachmann has also stated that the deaths in Benghazi, Libya of our ambassador there and three others were retribution for what this nation has done in the past and that this was also true of what happened on September eleventh of 2001. The problem is that there is an element that both Bachmann and West, as well as large swaths of the Republican party, who actually believe in this sort of thing. So, these people are not just fire bomb throwing radicals detached from reality. They are people who legitimately represent those who also believe what they believe in. There is an alternate reality out there! And, in certain areas of this nation, they are a majority large enough to elect people like Bachmann and West. There are coffee shops in parts of this nation that a visitor from the more liberal and progressive parts of the nation simply would not feel at home around because of the conversation and the beliefs that are espoused there among the good ole’ boys who inhabit them and the geography that surrounds them.
We were in Chicago, Illinois on a vacation trip last year and we made the acquaintance of this couple from Tennessee who also happened to be vacationing there. We did just fine until politics came up and they found out that we were an Obama supporter. They terminated the relationship immediately and simply walked away from us. And that is the feeling that so many Americans have for those that they do not care to understand or to believe. It is beyond the point of argument with so many of them. They want to be isolated from the body politic and have established an alternate world all their own replete with its own belief systems and even its own institutions that are very diverse from those that most of us take for granted. These people, after all, go to churches who believe that women are subservient beings and that there is no bigger lie than evolution. That is why when people like Bachmann and West speak the vitriol that they speak, it is accepted as gospel by those that they represent.
If there is any hope to any of this it is the fact that there are limits beyond which these characters can go. Bachmann spent eight and one half minutes on her congressional website stating why she would not leave the congress but did not tell us of any real reason why she was leaving. She made the analogy that presidents should not serve more than eight years in office and that we why she was not seeking a firth term that would take her over eight years. This was, of course, patently B.S. as the investigations into her failed presidential campaign have turned what was a narrow majority of the voters in her district into a probable minority. Allen West was not smart enough to realize that there were limits to what he too could do and say and he lost in the last election despite the ability to raise, as is with Bachmann, large amounts of money from the faithful.
We do not need to worry about the radical right losing representation in the congress as we have the likes of Texas senator Ted Cruz to pick up the fallen torch that Bachmann and West have left behind. It burns brightly in these hands as they fan the fires of supposed frontier liberty that does not include the likes of minorities such as blacks and Latinos. There seems to be an endless supply of new leaders who spring from the loins of the unwashed masses who have not been affected by things like liberalism and what it has supposedly done to the nation over the last fifty or sixty years. As president Obama said in the 2008 presidential campaign: these people cling to their guns and their religion! And as people like Sarah Palin have so eloquently parroted, they will continue to do so until the bitter end comes.
And so Michelle Bachmann now prepares to ride off into the sunset which will be long and filled with many lucrative speaking engagements and possibly a spot on Fox News. And her glory will be spoken and lauded by the likes of Rush Limbaugh who never even tried for public office. Thank God for small favors and those that are not so small!!!
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.
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