Meanwhile, inside Michele Bachmann’s head

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 6 Comments

She will also make The Family Circus less preachy.

As Michele Bachmann’s presidential candidacy increasingly resembles a thing that is actually happening, we will probably see a surfeit of Meanwhile, Inside Michele Bachmann’s Heads. I’m basing this conjecture on the Palin Cycle, which taught us that I will lose interest in a given nutso church lady long after you guys have. I apologize in advance, both to you and to the panels before which people like me will undoubtedly be called should President Bachmann take office. You know she’s going to win, too, because she’s using a method time-honored by student council candidates across the nation: making promises about stuff she cannot control. Bachmann’s pledge to get the price of gas below $2 a gallon is the frozen yogurt machine in the cafeteria of national politics. Because she is more a bold visionary and less a person who connects her desires to specific actions, we don’t know Bachmann’s gas plan. But conveniently, Don Shelby over at MinnPost has compiled her options.

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Joel Marks on post-moralism

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas 2 Comments

You must never touch him.

If you enjoy nuanced philosophical discussions occasionally interrupted by a smugly facile Stanley Fish, you probably already read the New York Times’s Stone blog. I’ve lost you already, haven’t I? How about this: on Sunday, the Times published an opinion piece that contained the sentence “the personal experiment of excluding all moral concepts and language from my thinking, feeling and actions has proved so workable and attractive, I am convinced that anyone who gives it a fair shot would likely find it to his liking.” That’s Joel Marks, writing about his transition from secular ethicist to amoralist and touching on several interesting problems in contemporary discourse. In addition to being the subject of the world’s shortest-range headshot, Marks proposes that faith in an objective morality is no more reasonable than faith in god. He also introduces a spate of unfounded assumptions along the way.

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Five-year survey yields bitter confirmation re: Tea Party

By Dan Brooks in Tea Party 5 Comments

His support for abortion makes him an extreme outlier within the Tea Party, but his Skynrd shirt puts him right back in the middle.

Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the Tea Party is its members’ claims about who they are. Tea Party groups continue to identify as grassroots, non-partisan coalitions of citizens from every walk of life, when we all know that they’re white racist Republicans or, sometimes, white racist libertarians. By “know,” here, I mean “assume in a way that makes us feel guilty about our own closemindedness.” There is no quantitative proof that Tea Partiers are more bigoted, GOP-affiliated and prone to sunburn than the average American, after all. For that you’d need some kind of comprehensive, long-term survey, and such a thing would be too good to—oh, you shouldn’t have, David Campbell and Robert Putnam of Notre Dame. And just in time for my birthday, too.

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Combat! blog to be eaten by bear

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 2 Comments

Hey, dudes. By the time you read this, I will be resting comfortably at the bottom of an ice crevasse, having gone to Glacier National Park for a camping trip. In the rare event that I survive, Combat! blog will resume on Monday. If I don’t make it back, I hereby delegate operation of the blog to Mike Thurau, who I presume is spending this week car-camping in the parking lot at Dave & Busters. See you next week, you bold, free Americans.

 

Meanwhile, inside Michele Bachmann’s head

By Dan Brooks in inside Michele Bachmann's head 1 Comment

If you woke up Sunday morning like, “What’s with all these two-headed calves and cats walking backwards?” you probably didn’t hear that Michele Bachmann won the Iowa Republican straw poll. Before you switch your breathing strategy from paper bag to plastic, we’d like to remind you that second place went to Ron Paul. Using the Iowa Republican straw poll to guess who’s going win the general election is like using a Star Wars convention to guess who’s going to win the Miss America pageant; it’s alarming that they picked Chewbacca, but it’s not necessarily predictive. The flat, conservative, pig-manure filled region of the country known as Michele Bachmann’s head is perfect for the Iowans who vote in the pre-caucus GOP event that happens 15 months before the general election, because those people are kind of crazy. Bachmann’s win is a testament less to her broad appeal—we still haven’t measured that, because the instruments always get scared and move to Canada—than to her ability to hew to party orthodoxy. As Thursday’s debate showed, that ability is phenomenal. Why she’s so good at it is difficult to say, but it appears to have something to do with her absolute, eerie certainty on virtually every issue. She’s like Sarah Palin only saying one sentence at a time, and frankly I find that frightening. If you don’t believe me, check out her Meet the Press appearance after the jump.

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