Spanking The Monkey

 

The trouble with ignorance is that it picks up confidence as it goes along.
- Arnold H. Glasow, humorist, Glasow's Gloombusters

I’m going to miss Michele Bachmann when she goes.

No, really.

I am.

I’m going to miss the paint-eating piss-drinking mewling ball of fuzzy-headed crazy that is Michele Bachmann.

I gotta tell you, I sincerely hope that when she punches out of Congress next year she doesn’t just fade away like Herman the Pizza Man or Todd “Too Legit” Akins. Maybe she’ll join the shrill cawing murder of crows on The View (Seriously, how long can Jenny McCarthy last anyway? McCarthy is a one trick pony. Bachmann can do the anti-vaxxer shtick and so very, very much more. Just think about it, ABC, that’s all I’m asking).

What?

You think I’m kidding?

OK, maybe I’m kidding a little, but for political bloggers like me, Michele Bachmann is the mother lode. She’s like finding a $20 bill in your jeans pocket that you forgot you had. She’s like getting lucky in the middle of the week when you weren’t even trying.  I get up in the morning and I see that Michele Bachmann made the headlines above the fold and I’ve got to set the coffee cup down because I know the day is going to start with a belly laugh.

Dangerous? Unpredictable? Extremist? Leader of a fanatical army of pretend soldiers? Plugged into an alternate reality and not shy about admitting it? Prone to unhinged bizarre proclamations? Eclectic fashion sense? Great hair?

C’mon, tell me you don’t see it. 

That’s right, Crazy Eyes Bachmann is the Colonel Gaddafi of the US House of Representatives.

"Contrary to popular opinion, Republicans won't get patted on the back or get new votes because of passing amnesty. They're going to get blamed. And it's my prediction that the House Republicans could put themselves in a position where they could actually lose the gavel in 2014, because I think the president, even by executive order, can again wave his magic wand before 2014 and he'd say now all of the new, legal Americans are going to have voting rights.”

That was Bachmann talking to (snort chuckle) World Net Daily last Monday about why immigration reform would be a disaster for Republicans – and therefore America in general.

Insanity is a logarithmic function. In other words, two gibbering loons aren’t just twice as bonkers as one, together they’re more like nine times the raw flaming insanity of just one crazy barker alone. Bachmann, her eyes a rollin’ around in their sockets with the whites showing like a panicked galloping mare afraid the wolves are on her tail, being interviewed by the reality-challenged, conspiracy-fuelled whirling over-unity generator that is World Net Daily is a whole lot like locking a screaming hysterical claustrophobe into a small airtight box filled with snakes.

Contrary to popular opinion, Republicans won’t be hailed as heroes if they pass “amnesty.”

Popular opinion? Is this some magical alternate reality where sexual orientation can be flip-flopped through prayer, where money and opportunity really do trickle down from the wealthy in their ivory towers to enrich the masses like a golden shower dripping down from Heaven, where you really can bring freedom and liberty to oppressed countries in the belly of a B-52, and where the nation will cheer conservative lawmakers for finally doing their fucking jobs instead of obstructing the business of the nation? 

Popular opinion?

Whose popular opinion exactly?  Be specific, Michele, show your work.

It’s telling that Bachmann leads off with that particular statement, especially the part about “republicans […] wont […] get new votes.”

More than anything that, that, right there, is what’s wrong with Congress and specifically with the House of Representatives. 

Right there.  In Bachmann’s view, the only legislation that should be taken up by the House, is that which is guaranteed to get a political party more votes – not what’s best for the nation, not those things that directly affect the daily lives of the people, not even what’s best for the state she’s supposed to be representing, no not that.  Only those things that give her party new votes. Otherwise? Pffft!

…I think the president, even by executive order, can again wave his magic wand before 2014 and he'd say now all of the new, legal Americans are going to have voting rights

And that’s the rest of what’s wrong with our Government.

What?

No, no. Now you stop that. I’m not talking about Bachmann’s ongoing obsession with Obama’s magic wand. 

I’m talking about willful ignorance and booger-eating stupidity hailed increasingly by the electorate as some kind of virtue.

Bachmann is a sitting member of the United States House of Representatives.

She’s been a congressman since 2006.

She was born in the United States, she had full and unlimited access to education.

She’s 57 years old, more than long enough to learn something about the country she’s supposed to be running.

She’s got a college degree.

She used to be a lawyer.

Hell, she’s even got access to Google.

And she still has no idea, no idea whatsoever, of what exactly an Executive Order is, or to whom it applies, or what the limits of its authority are.

How is that even possible?

Bachmann, and those of her ilk, are allowed to be this goddamned stupid because we don’t make congressmen take the same basic citizenship tests that any legal immigrant has to pass. She was just born into her citizenship, like some weak-chinned inbred hemophiliac idiot member of the royalty entitled to money and privilege. Bachmann, a six-year member of the US House of Representatives, a sitting member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, thinks that an Executive Order is like “waving a magic wand.” Like the men who fought to free themselves from the King of England were so damned stupid, as stupid as Bachmann herself apparently, that they somehow forgot to put a line in the Constitution that, you know, limits the power of the Executive.

Wait, what do you mean George Washington just declared himself Grand Panjandrum of America? And now we all have to take his orders? Goddamnit, Madison, you idiot! What? Was your powdered wig in your eyes? What the hell, man, what the hell?

Yeah, boy, executive orders, how’d the Framers miss that?

(You may, if you like, visualize James Madison mouthing the words “bite me” here)

On the face of it, given her own words, Bachmann apparently believes that the president is like King Joffrey or His Humungous The Pope, you know, a guy who sits on some kind of big scary throne made out of the embalmed sexual organs of his vanquished enemies and he just sort of gestures with his jewel encrusted scepter and makes a proclamation and abracadabra! it’s the law of the land and everybody has to follow it or risk their own reproductive organs being added to the pile. Of course, given that as a fuzzy-headed evangelical Michele Bachmann already professes a literal belief in horned demons and talking snakes, I suppose it’s not that great of a stretch for her to believe the president can unlimber the Magic Negro Ray of Chocolate Mojo and just make all illegal aliens into citizens of the United States and, presto change-O, give them voting rights through Executive Fiat.

Hey, far be from me to question a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, right?

I’m sure she’s got the documentation to back up her claim, besides World Net Daily I mean.

Yeah, I’m sure Bachmann can back up her statement.

"Why do I say that? He did it in 2012. Do you remember? Anyone who was here as a Latina under age 30, he said, 'You get to vote.' “

Say what now?

Do I remember that Obama gave voting rights to young female illegal immigrants from South and Central America in 2012?

Um, no, actually I don’t remember that.

I Googled it, the internet doesn’t remember it either.

In fact, nobody seems to remember this event – and you sort of think they would, wouldn’t you?

Nobody remembers it because it didn’t actually happen … unless Bachmann is referring to that aforementioned alternate reality she seems to spend so much time in.

"What? He [Obama] decides you get to vote? If he did it 2012, know, take it to the bank, he'll do in 2014. And then guess what will happen? Democrat in the White House; Democrats controlling the Senate; Democrats controlling the House. At that point they will change election law, and it will be almost impossible to ever see a Republican majority again.”

You wonder what people like Michele Bachmann fear? What imaginary horror keeps them awake at night shivering the dark with the sheets pulled up over their terrified heads listening for the soft wet footsteps of the bogeyman coming ever closer and closer?

This, right here.

She’s terrified of something that never happened.

Michele Bachmann is literally afraid of the bogeyman.

This, my shiny electronic friends, is the true horror: the willful abdication of intellect and reason.

Democracy and the Republic depend for their very existence on educated intellect, steady reason, and measured discourse.  Hysteria, paranoia writ large, and outright provable falsehoods based on self-serving religious and/or political fanaticism accepted as unchallenged truth are a poison to the tree of liberty.  This is, always, the Achilles' Heel of democracy. 

That paragraph above, Bachmann’s Bogeyman, is the inevitable end result of religious fanaticism. 

These people believe in a religion that is almost entirely made up of denial, intimidation, and threats of dire consequences whored up in frilly clothing and cheap perfume.  Her entire evangelical belief systems can be summed up in one line: Believe in made up magic fairy dust as defined by the self-declared righteous, or be wrapped in chains of ice and thrown into a pit of boiling oil and be horribly tortured until the stars burn out.  It is a profoundly bankrupt moral philosophy, one based on fear and selfishness and extortion.

And that kind of thinking, that kind of terror, bleeds over into everything.

Michele Bachmann and those like her are outraged by something that never happened and they’re terrified that this mystical event will happen again and then they’ll somehow lose their ticket to heaven.  As I’ve said before, these people believe that America is a zero sum game. They are truly afraid that if somebody else gets more liberty, they somehow get less. This is exactly the same way they regard the ultimate reward in their selfish ingrown religion, i.e. it’s not really heaven if everybody gets to go, now is it?

Again, it’s telling that Bachmann should phrase her fear the way she did.  And it’s enlightening, the parts of religion that she embraces. It’s a case here of do unto others before they do unto you, I guess, given that Bachmann is front and center on efforts to reform voting rights in order to disenfranchise the very people she fears.  How, exactly, election law could be changed to prevent Republicans from winning she didn’t bother to explain, apparently she’s afraid that Barack Obama will use Executive Orders to make it illegal for rich old white men to vote (if only). Meanwhile, Tea Party republicans in nearly every state with the willing collusion of the Supreme Court are working diligently to to bring back Jim Crow specifically in order to nullify the traditional democratic base.

As I said, telling.

“Do we get how important this is? I'm not crying wolf here.”

Again, this is the end result of lying to yourself as a way of life. These are the same exact people who claim they are champions of liberty, while deliberately working to limit the rights of minorities. These are the people who claim to love democracy, but only if the people they don’t like are excluded from it. These are the people who claim to be Christian, but only quote the part of the Bible that happened before Jesus showed up. These are the very people who claim to embrace self-determination as the fundamental core of freedom, while frantically attempting to limit a woman’s right to choose for herself.  These are the people who claim to stand for religious freedom, while at the same time they attempt to jam their version of Bronze Age pinch-faced Christianity down everybody else’s throat – all the while protesting that they are being persecuted.

Not crying wolf?

Not crying wolf?

The fuck?

I call Shenanigans, that’s exactly what she’s doing. Obviously, provably, blatantly so.

”This is working for the president. It's not working for the American people, but, hey, it's great by him. He has a perpetual magic wand and nobody's given him a spanking yet and taken it out of his hand. That's what Congress needs to do, give the president a major wake-up call. And the way we spank the president is we do it through the checkbook. We're the ones who say, 'No, you can't have the money.'”

He has a magic wand. Somebody needs to give him a spanking and take it out of his hand.

Boom chicka chicka bow bow.

Seriously, who talks like this?

Outside of an eighth grade boys locker room, I mean.  

I swear, every time I watch the idiotic drivel pour from her mouth, I expect an anvil or a piano to fall out of the sky and smash her into a little round circle with a pair of googly eyes blinking cartoonishly in the middle of it.

If the Tea Party talk show circuit and book deal doesn’t pan out for her after Congress, Bachmann could always make some dough on the side penning inane dialog for the S&M division of the porn industry.

So, leaving aside that mental image of Michele Bachmann polishing the president’s magic wand, exactly what the hell is she talking about here? What money is she referring to? Congress, led by Tea Party Dominatrix Michele Bachmann and her band of anally fixated chicken chokers, has already “spanked” the president by putting the entire country into sequestration. Her idiot political party “punished” Barack Obama by lopping off their own noses and cutting the pay of federal workers by 20%, including members of their own staffs (note that the workload wasn’t cut, just the pay.  As a federal worker you still get to do five days worth of work – in four days – for one fifth less money.  Because, see, as a federal worker the government has the option of just changing your contract arbitrarily to meet some politician’s agenda any goddamned time they want to. Meanwhile, of course, Congressional pay remains unaffected. Because, well, fuck you, that’s why. Cute, eh?).

So who are they going to rob next in order to make a political point?

And finally, Bachmann ends with this plaintive question:

“What's wrong with us?”

What’s wrong?

What’s wrong?

What’s wrong is that we let people like Michele Bachmann anywhere near the halls of power.

What’s wrong is that this childish frightened woman, and those like her, are terrified of the bogeyman, they're outraged over something that never happened, they’re terrified by nonexistent dangers they’ve dreamed up whole cloth in their fevered imaginations – from Kenyan Socialist Manchurian Candidates to Benghazi Conspiracies to imagined magic wands.

Look, here’s the bottom line: I’m not telling you who to vote for. I’m not telling you which political party to identify with. I’m for damned sure not telling you that you have to like the President – this particular one or any other. What I’m saying, what I have always said, is this: if you’re going to hate somebody, if you’re going to really hate somebody, then at least hate them for who they actually are, not some made up monster you created in your own fearful mind.

That was the point of the previous post, the one that went viral, the one that a hundred thousand people have now read, the one I’m still getting a hundred letters a day about, An Open Letter to the Idiot Nation.

If you’re going to hate the president, if you’re going to oppose immigration reform, or gun control, or Islam, or people with different colored skins and funny accents, or the TSA and NSA and the CIA, or the Gay Agenda, or any other bogeyman, at least oppose it for real, actual, reasons and not some made up phantasm created by World Net Daily.

I said I’d miss Michele Bachmann when she goes.

And so I shall.

I won’t miss her insanity roaming the halls of Congress and we as a country are well shed of her lunacy.

But nonetheless she is the single most visible symbol of everything that’s wrong with our dysfunctional Legislature. 

She is an abject example of the very real dangers of extremism and of the growing religious fanaticism in this country.

Michele Bachmann is the parakeet in the mines of the Republic, sounding the warning of our declining intellect and our perilous abandonment of reason and the silently rising poisonous gases of hate and fear and blind ignorance.

It’s not the chirping that concerns me, so much as the silence.