Wednesday, June 22, 2011

"one of the scariest sights in the entire American cultural tableau"

Opening ¶s from a piece by Matt Taibbi on the Crazy White Woman in Rolling Stone:

Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and, as you consider the career and future presidential prospects of an incredible American phenomenon named Michele Bachmann, do one more thing. Don't laugh.

It may be the hardest thing you ever do, for Michele Bachmann is almost certainly the funniest thing that has ever happened to American presidential politics. Fans of obscure 1970s television may remember a short-lived children's show called Far Out Space Nuts, in which a pair of dimwitted NASA repairmen, one of whom is played by Bob (Gilligan) Denver, accidentally send themselves into space by pressing "launch" instead of "lunch" inside a capsule they were fixing at Cape Canaveral. This plot device roughly approximates the political and cultural mechanism that is sending Michele Bachmann hurtling in the direction of the Oval Office.

Go.

One more:

In modern American politics, being the right kind of ignorant and entertainingly crazy is like having a big right hand in boxing; you've always got a puncher's chance. And Bachmann is exactly the right kind of completely batshit crazy. Not medically crazy, not talking-to-herself-on-the-subway crazy, but grandiose crazy, late-stage Kim Jong-Il crazy — crazy in the sense that she's living completely inside her own mind, frenetically pacing the hallways of a vast sand castle she's built in there, unable to meaningfully communicate with the human beings on the other side of the moat, who are all presumed to be enemies.

Shorter: Batcrap crazy and no joke.

3 comments:

CAFKIA said...

But if she catches the tiger, then what? Will either side of the aisle work with her? (to be fair, the answer could be scary)

Gordon said...

If she catches it just right, maybe it'll eat her. I don't think she works very well across the aisle right now.

Fixer said...

Somehow, I don't think the "establishment" Rethugs will let her win. She can do too much damage to them. I'm sure they'd rather have one of the "Men from Mormon".