This is reality, folks, by way of Matt Taibbi. It should be tattooed on the inside of every lefty-with-a-blog’s eyelids (emphasis added).
Bachmann is a religious zealot whose brain is a raging electrical storm of divine visions and paranoid delusions. She believes that the Chinese are plotting to replace the dollar bill, that light bulbs are killing our dogs and cats, and that God personally chose her to become both an IRS attorney who would spend years hounding taxpayers and a raging anti-tax Tea Party crusader against big government.
Snickering readers in New York or Los Angeles might be tempted by all of this to conclude that Bachmann is uniquely crazy. But in fact, such tales by Bachmann work precisely because there are a great many people in America just like Bachmann, people who believe that God tells them what condiments to put on their hamburgers, who can’t tell the difference between Soviet Communism and a Stafford loan, but can certainly tell the difference between being mocked and being taken seriously. When you laugh at Michele Bachmann for going on MSNBC and blurting out that the moon is made of red communist cheese, these people don’t learn that she is wrong. What they learn is that you’re a dick, that they hate you more than ever, and that they’re even more determined now to support anyone who promises not to laugh at their own visions and fantasies.
I’m old enough to remember folks laughing at the absurd notion that Ronald Reagan could actually become President. And today, of course, we’re living somewhere to the right of Reagan’s World.
I’m not saying that Bachmann is The New Reagan. But Taibbi’s correct in saying that we shouldn’t be too quick to trivialize her.
Neither Reagan nor Bush came across as mean.
I like to think that someone who is both ignorant and mean is still unelectable in the United States.