Meanwhile, inside Michele Bachmann’s career

By Dan Brooks in Meanwhile 5 Comments
Michele Bachmann wants you to pull another quarter out of her ear, but this time she's watching.

Michele Bachmann wants you to pull another quarter out of her ear, but this time she’s watching.

Could this be the end of Michele Bachmann head science? It’s possible the wormhole is collapsing, as the four-term Representative from Minnesota announced that she will not seek reelection in 2014. Her decision is definitely not related to the 1.1% victory she won last year over Jim Graves, who recently announced that he would run for her seat again. Nor is it connected to the ongoing ethics probe into her 2012 presidential campaign. You can watch Bachmann explain how unimportant both of those things are in this eight-minute video:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEjiLEc5z-M

I will miss her cadence most of all—like a children’s record played at the wrong speed.

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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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Meanwhile, inside Michele Bachmann’s head

By Dan Brooks in Meanwhile 7 Comments

Representative Bachmann pauses for four minutes to remember the lyrics to "Bust a Move."

It’s been a long time since we last caught a glimpse of the teddy bear’s picnic inside Michele Bachmann’s head, but we can now triangulate one more point in that extradimensional manifold. Inside Michele Bachmann’s head, the Revolutionary War began in New Hampshire. Speaking to that state’s Republican Liberty Caucus on Saturday, Bachmann observed that “What I love about New Hampshire and what we have in common is our extreme love for liberty. You’re the state where the shot was heard around the world in Lexington and Concord.” Of course, that was not true. Massachusetts is the state where the shot was heard ’round the world, or rather the world is the place where the shot was heard et cetera, and Massachusetts is the state where it was fired. It can be tough to remember, so I encouraged my students to use the following mnemonic device: the Battles of Lexington and Concorde took place at Lexington and Concorde, which continue to be located in Massachusetts, you stooge. It’s better if you can hear the song.

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