Meanwhile, inside Michele Bachmann’s head

By Dan Brooks in inside Michele Bachmann's head 6 Comments

run subroutine {real Americans} ^not found^ :: gosub {made-up statistics} ^catalog error^ /fail

Like a child who insists that everyone watch her do a roundoff after her older sister’s piano recital, Michele Bachmann held a rally of her own Saturday at the Washington Monument, across the Mall from Glenn Beck. The event was essentially a campaign speech—outside of the state in which she is campaigning, which adds to the terrifying accumulation of evidence that Bachmann is trying to become some sort of national figure—but it occasioned perhaps the funniest Washington Post story ever written. Emi Kolawole packs more gems of dry paragraph-structure humor into her 275 words than I have time to enumerate here, including:

The Republican lawmaker also took the opportunity to list members of the House Tea Party Caucus, which she chairs. When she reached the name of Rep. Joe Wilson, best known for shouting “you lie” during President Obama’s address to Congress, the crowd started chanting “you lie.”

The best journalism makes you feel like you’re there. My favorite quote from Kolawole’s report, however, and the big story from the event, was Bachmann’s absurd estimate of the size of the crowd. Lay down some plastic, because your head is going to explode when you click on “More…”

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Meanwhile, inside Michele Bachmann’s head

By Dan Brooks in Tea Party 0 Comment

"We set out early. Light was poor."

The Tea Party took another step toward actuality last week with the approval of a congressional Tea Party Caucus, headed by none other than Michele Bachmann. And you know what that means! Okay, technically that does not mean it’s time for another edition of Meanwhile, inside Michele Bachmann’s head, since that series is explicitly not about Michele Bachmann. It seemed like a genius system at the time, but in retrospect our decision to make MIMBH about everyone but the person whose name is mentioned in the title was an editorial oversight. Henceforth, Combat! blog will use Meanwhile, inside Michele Bachmann’s head to talk about Michele Bachmann. This paragraph is surely of little interest to anyone, except various web crawlers that are, as we speak, making this page the definitive result for people who type “michele bachmann” into Google. For the purposes of attracting that traffic, let me just wind things up by saying michele bachmann hot, michele bachmann legs, michele bachmann crazy bitch who looks at me while i’m asleep.

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Close readings: Michele Bachmann warns of “nation of slaves”

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse 3 Comments

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It’s technically unfair that I have used this picture, since today’s Combat! is not an edition of Meanwhile, inside Michele Bachmann’s head, which series is explicitly devoted to things that Michele Bachmann did not say. It’s a terrifyingly confusing system developed by a probably incompetent man, but we’re stuck with it. Today is an edition of Close readings, in which we analyze in detail one particular public statement made by one particular individual—in this case, that most particular of US congresspeople, Michele Bachmann. Speaking to the Western Conservative Summit in Denver on Friday, Representative Bachmann warned that President Obama, the Democratic Party and health care reform were turning the United States into “a nation of slaves.”* It’s possible she was taking a page from Rick Barber. It’s possible she was connecting her remarks to the writings of the Founding Fathers. It’s possible she’s a crazy person whom we have inadvertently vested with the power to make laws. Only the skills we learned as English majors can tell us for sure, and the time has come for us to perform a close reading. Won’t you join me in the study?

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Meanwhile, inside Michele Bachmann’s head

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 5 Comments

Before you get too excited, Michele Bachmann does not figure directly in the content of this post. Today’s post is about a poll, which subject poses a perennial problem in choosing a snappy header image. Polls look boring. This picture of Michele Bachmann, on the other hand, looks the opposite of boring, in that the longer you look at it the more hilarious it becomes. Try it. Are you imagining circus noises? A steadily growing pile of peanut shells? I have decided to make today’s poll part of an ongoing series, in which we examine visually uninteresting clues as to what we can know about being Michele Bachmann. I call it Meanwhile, Inside Michele Bachmann’s Head, and it’s happening now so you tacitly accept it.

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Michele Bachmann: Just sayin’ stuff

By Dan Brooks in Just Sayin' Stuff 11 Comments

The longer you look at her facial expression, the less it looks like a smile.

Yesterday, in our discussion of whether stupidity provides a natural barrier to participation in democratic politics, we linked to an article describing Michele Bachmann’s mildly disastrous appearance on Fox News Sunday. After lamenting that “one hundred percent of the private economy used to be private,” Bachmann alleged that federal interference in private industry is at an all-time high, and that the US government now controls “over 50% of the private economy.” Who knows what’s really going on in the nest of old newspapers and children’s drawings of Jesus that Representative Bachmann calls a head, but it appears that when she says “private economy” she means “domestic economy.” It also appears that when she uses the word “control”—as in, “the US government now has direct ownership or control over the health care industry,”—she means “regulates in some way.” Bachmann says a lot of things that sound terrifying when taken literally, and she backs them up with numbers. Here she is running down the same talking points on Face the Nation:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qyQHd-3HYI

Scary, right? The federal government controls 51% of the economy, it owns half the mortgages in the country, 30% of doctors intend to leave the practice of medicine now that Obamacare has passed—all of these numbers describe an America in dire straits. Fortunately for us, they’re also made up. Bachmann’s tour of news show appearances to warn us about creeping socialism is built primarily on “facts” she got from chain emails or fabricated entirely, and while that sort of thing might fly on Fox News, CBS don’t play that. It turns out they have a whole staff of people whose job it is to find out whether the stuff people say on their television show is actually true, and Bachmann did not do so hot.

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