Michele Bachmann

Bachmann, prowling the back alleys of Capitol Hill.

God, guns, and freedom U.S. Politics

Starting arguments over Thanksgiving dinner

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Persons of interest

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“”We have checked [Michele Bachmann] 13 times, and seven of her claims [have been found] to be false and six have been found to be ridiculously false ... She is unusual in that regard that she has never gotten a rating higher than false.

—Bill Adair, PolitiFact

“”[Michele] Bachmann is a religious zealot whose brain is a raging electrical storm of divine visions and paranoid delusions... Bachmann is exactly the right kind of completely batshit 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.

—Matt Taibbi

Michele Bachmann, née Amble (1956–), is an American (and for a very short time, Swiss citizen) Republican and former Representative from Minnesota's 6th Congressional District who enjoyed a brief tenure as the Religious Right's pin-up girl following the implosions of Sarah Palin and Christine O'Donnell.

She ran for President in 2012 On August 13th, she won the Ames Straw Poll, narrowly beating Ron Paul and showcasing her strength in the first caucus state. For a while, some Americans thought that she could beat Mitt Romney to the Republican nomination. She dropped out after a dismal showing in the Iowa caucus. Her unsuccessful candidacy may have done her even less of a favor by dropping a Congressional investigation concerning campaign financing shenanigans in her lap in early 2013.

In 2012, she won re-election in a surprisingly heated race against hotel mogul Jim Graves. This proved to be a Pyrrhic victory, as she announced that she would not be running for re-election in 2014 due to multiple insane public statements and ethics investigations because term limits. And Jesus.

Political positions

“”For a number of years, Michele Bachmann’s personal website had a list of books she recommended people read. I was looking over the list and noticed this biography of Robert E. Lee by Steven Wilkins. I had never heard of Wilkins and started looking at who he was. And frankly couldn’t believe that she was recommending this book ... it is an objectively pro-slavery book and one of the most startling things I learned about her.

—Ryan Lizza

Despite her relatively short political career, Bachmann has established herself as a unique brand in American politics, mostly due to her scary ability to immediately occupy an utterly extremist position on any given issue.

Religion

Bachmann is a dyed-in-the-wool fundamentalist who frequently claims that she's acting on direct orders from God himself. She got her law degree from a tiny Christian university that specializes in teaching "the law from a biblical worldview" and would like its students to become "change agents" for bringing the law in line with Christian morality. She worked as a research assistant for notable dominionist John Eidsmoe and helped him produce a book that argued for turning the United States into a theocracy.

Not to be outdone, Bachmann got in on the Evil Mooslim Invad3rs sweepstakes when she attacked State Department official Huma Abedin for supposedly having connections to the Muslim Brotherhood despite the rather obvious fact that Bachmann could only name family members who weren't Abedin herself as having those tenuous "connections". An indication of how goofy Bachmann's attack came off is indicated by the fact that Congressional Republicans like John McCain and John Boehner came to the defense of Abedin. Her campaign manager Ed Rollins, who went to work for a pro-Trump SuperPAC, also quit over the matter. Fellow loons like Frank Gaffney and Jerry Boykin immediately jumped onto the sekrit mooslim conspiracy bandwagon.

In September 2013, she took a trip to Egypt with fellow Congressional oddities Louie Gohmert and Steve King. She took time to laud the military junta for overthrowing former President Mohamed Morsi. She also implied that Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood allies were to blame for 9/11, which is either an outright lie or something that should have gotten a speechwriter or two fired.

A bit later that year, she stated that President Obama was actively giving aid to Al-Qaeda by waiving "a ban on selling arms to terrorists" (which conveniently ignores the actual new policy, which only lifts bans on "appropriate, certain non-lethal assistance inside or related to Syria" to certain vetted rebel groups); furthermore, such an action proves that we're living in the End Times. Whether the previous quoted material is a more an indicator of Dunning-Kruger effect concerning international arms control policy, theology and some weird combination thereof is strictly up to the imagination of the reader.

Bachmann has also castigated The Jews for "selling out" Israel by supporting Obama. The Jews would be more useful to her if they acted out the prophecies leading to the second coming of Jesus, leading to their salvation/damnation, naturally.

Health care

Bachmann and other Republicans have been praying for the failure of Obama's health care reform, and she is fighting in practical ways to try and get it repealed. Americans on the Religious right teach that denying health care to impoverished sick people is doing the will of sweet Jesus. However, Christians outside the United States may struggle to understand that doctrine. It might also be connected to the fact that high-income-earners who don't want to pay taxes are the backbone of the Republican party. Also, she has jumped on Rick Perry for mandating vaccinations against HPV. She bases many of her views concerning health science on articles found in this prestigious journal.

Taxes and Government

Interestingly, Bachmann used to be an attorney in the Justice Department's tax division (representing the IRS) for several years - in other words, one of the people most of her current Tea Party fans would probably consider evil incarnate. Nowadays, she compares taxation to slavery. Like any good Republican, she's also in favor of minimal government intrusion into citizens' lives (unless it is for a noble cause like correcting people's deviant sexual behavior, of course). Despite her free-market stance and opposition to federal assistance to, well, anybody, she has banked over $250,000 in farm subsidies. A counseling agency that she runs together with her husband also received $27,000 in state funds since 2007 for the treatment of low-income patients. Since the agency in question is overtly Christian, it is questionable whether they separate their professional care from proselytizing. Marcus Bachmann is on record saying one should not ask confused people how they feel, but rather employ fundamentalist Christianity as a guiding principle and “call sin ‘sin’”. He'd also have parents exorcise their kids' gayness through "discipline". Still, it's nice to know Bachmann doesn't have to look too far for someone specializing in mental health issues.

In addition to her forays into lunacy pet theories of public policy, she wasn't above claiming that President Obama had committed "impeachable offenses" that amounted to "thuggery", which was leading the US into a dictatorship. Likewise, the media could be characterized as "Treason Media" because “They have done everything they can to facilitate this president because they agree with him, they agree with his worldview, they agree with his message, they have no interest in the truth, they only have an interest in protecting this President". This even though she's been on "Treason Media" outlets like Meet the Press and Face the Nation more than a few times herself. Oops.

Homosexuality

Bachmann seems to believe in a homosexual agenda to target and encourage young children to be gay and thinks the Lion King is part of that conspiracy. She thinks her step-sister's lesbian lifestyle is part of Satan. Fighting same-sex marriage has been her top legislative priority, both in the Minnesota State Senate and the House of Representatives. Notably, she campaigned to amend the Minnesota constitution to outlaw same-sex marriage—even though the state had already passed a law prohibiting it. She does all that on the very best authority because God told her personally that he does not like gays. When a group of gay rights activists held a rally against her plan in front of the State Capitol, she took in on herself to spy on them, hiding behind some bushes.

In a 2005 incident, a couple of lesbians attempted to talk to her in the bathroom after a campaign event. The police were called in after Bachmann screamed that she was "being held against my will". Her husband claims that his counseling clinic, Bachmann & Associates, can cure gayness, while publicly denying that it engages in "reparative therapy."

Bachmann has accused gay people of bullying straight people: "And the thing that I think is getting a little tiresome is the gay community have so bullied the American people and they have so intimidated politicians that politicians fear them and they think they get to dictate the agenda everywhere." Actual victims of bullying, like Matthew Shepard, beg to disagree.

Historical scholarship

Bachmann is often known for putting, shall we say, a new spin and a unique perspective on historical events:

• Regarding the Founding Fathers and the United States Constitution, "We also know that the very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States."
• When called out on it, rather than admit her mistake, she doubled down by stating that John Q. Adams was a founding father and "fought tirelessly to end slavery" during the Revolutionary War era, even though he was 9 at the time of America's founding. While John Q. Adams did eventually emerge as a significant figure in the abolitionist movement, that did not happen before the 1820s.
• Calvin Coolidge got us out of a depression while FDR started the Great Depression by passing the "Hoot-Smalley" tariff.
• The American Revolution started in New Hampshire, not Massachusetts. Silly historians.
• The Soviet Union still exists.

Women

Following the example set by Phyllis Schlafly, Bachmann encourages women to submit to their husbands, with her own creepy marriage to Marcus Bachmann setting the standard. As was the case for Schlafly, Bachmann was fortunate enough to marry a husband happy to permit extended time away from kitchen/bedroom duties, allowing her to pursue a very public life and to educate women in submissiveness. In the creepy way that husbands of evangelical women appear to be replacement fathers, generally with more sex, Bachmann does little of importance without her husband's approval. As an example of this, she has claimed that she studied law because God told her to, and her husband approved. Even in the United States of America, Bachmann's "yes sir" relationship with her husband brought into question her ability to act as President of The United States of America. Would the country find crucial peace talks stalled because the president's husband/keeper demanded she stay home to give him a foot rub? Strangely, when asked directly if she would be submissive to her husband if she was President and follow his orders, she suddenly decided that the subject was off-limits and avoided the issue altogether.

Everything else

Bachmann first rose to nationwide prominence in the run-up to the 2008 election, when she called on the media to take up Joe McCarthy's work of investigating "anti-American" leanings among candidates. She has also announced that she refuses to fill out 2010 census forms for her family and has encouraged her supporters to likewise refuse, too. The fact that this might result in Minnesota being undercounted and thus maybe losing a seat or two in Congress has not occurred to her but has occurred to some others in the GOP. Her "reasoning" is that the Census will be used to set up the FEMA concentration camps everyone knows are coming in 2011. All of this even though a Census is specifically called for in the sacred text...err, the other sacred text. In Minnesota, she prevented preschool education despite scientific evidence that it works; apparently, teaching children the Bible and Christian values are more important than getting them a start in life that reduces crime and drug abuse, improves overall educational achievement and earnings. The fact that Bachmann was also invited to sit on the board of the Thomas More Law Center's Citizen's Advisory Board probably tells you all you need to know about either Bachmann or the TMLC.

Bachmann also made a bizarre, completely unexplained appearance at a Chicago synagogue during Yom Kippur in 2012. The fact that it was unannounced and unexplained is one thing; the fact that it was at a service celebrating "Israel's openness to the gay and lesbian community" is especially weird.

Batshit crazy quotes

• “This [health care reform] cannot pass…What we have to do today is make a covenant, to slit our wrists, be blood brothers on this thing. This will not pass."
• “The big thing we are working on now is the global warming hoax. It’s all voodoo, nonsense, hokum, a hoax”
• "What I would say -- what I would say is that the news media should do a penetrating expose and take a look. I wish they would. I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out, are they pro-America or anti-America? I think people would love to see an expose like that."
• "This [taxation] is slavery, it's nothing more than slavery. The Constitution provides freedom."
• "Last Friday a couple from Hawaii decided the time was so short they needed to get on a plane, come to Washington, to beg their representative to vote no — from Hawaii. What sacrifices freedom-loving Americans are making to get their government’s attention. And how big our government has gotten. They brought me this beautiful, precious lei and I’m reminded that the one who created this lei also created our freedom. "
• "We’re $14 trillion in debt, but that doesn’t include the unfunded massive liabilities. That’s $107 trillion, and that’s for Social Security and Medicare and all the rest. You add up all those unfunded net liabilities, and all the traps that could go wrong we’re on the hook for, and what it means is what we have to do is a reorganization of all of that, Social Security and all....But basically what we have to do is wean everybody else off. And wean everybody off because we have to take those unfunded net liabilities off our bank sheet, we can’t do it. So we just have to be straight with people. So basically, whoever our nominee is, is going to have to have a Glenn Beck chalkboard and explain to everybody this is the way it is."
• "But parents are going to [be] excluded from Planned Parenthood as they write these clinics because the bill orders that these clinics protect patient privacy and student records. What does that mean? It means that parents will never know what kind of counsel and treatment that their children are receiving. And as a matter of fact, the bill goes on to say what's going to go on -- comprehensive primary health services, physicals, treatment of minor acute medical conditions, referrals to follow-up for specialty care -- is that abortion? Does that mean that someone's 13 year-old daughter could walk into a sex clinic, have a pregnancy test done, be taken away to the local Planned Parenthood abortion clinic, have their abortion, be back and go home on the school bus that night? Mom and dad are never the wiser."
• Response to President Obama's 2011 State of the Union address: “The perilous battle that was fought during World War II in the Pacific at Iwo Jima was a battle against all odds, and yet this picture [the iconic flag-raising] immortalizes the victory of young GIs over the incursion against the Japanese.”
• "I don't know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We've had an earthquake; we've had a hurricane. He said, 'Are you going to start listening to me here?'
• "I haven’t had a gaffe or something that I’ve done that has caused me to fall in the polls."
• "I think what you’re advocating for is censorship on the part of government. So the government would prohibit intelligent design from even the possibility of being taught in questioning the issue of evolution. And if you look at scientists there is not a unanimity of agreement on the origins of life. … Why would we forstall any particular theory? Because I don’t think that even evolutionists, by and large, would say that this is proven fact. They say that this is a theory, as well as intelligent design. So I think the best thing to do is to let all scientific facts on the table, and let students decide.
• "Carbon dioxide is natural, it is not harmful, it is a part of Earth's lifecycle. And yet we're being told that we have to reduce this natural substance, reduce the American standard of living, to create an arbitrary reduction in something that is naturally occurring in Earth."
• "We have to recognize that 15 of the sites, nuclear sites, are available or are potentially penetrable by jihadists. Six attempts have already been made on nuclear sites. This is more than an existential threat...At this point, I would continue that aid. Pakistan is a nation that it’s kind of like, too nuclear to fail."
• "He has a perpetual magic wand and nobody's given him a spanking yet and taken it out of his hand."(NOTE: this was a comment about President Obama and immigration reform and apparently not her husband...we think.)
• "These are transgender Marxists — transgender Black Marxists — who are seeking the overthrow of the United States and the dissolution of the traditional family."

"Caring" = Crazy

In March 2013, she went on a bizarre spree of using derivations of the word "care" in an equally odd set of speeches. These included one at the CPAC conference where she stated that people cared much more in the fifties, which is why a vaccine for Polio was discovered then and why a cure for Alzheimer's Disease hasn't been found now, scientific research be damned. Unsurprisingly, she also determined that Liberals Were To Blame for all of this. The major drawback to the remainder of the speech was her accusation that the Obamas were living it up like 19th-century nobility despite the fact that a later Washington Post fact check clearly indicates that the charges were an overripe pile of guano. When questioned by this later on by CNN correspondent Dana Bash, a track meet broke out. This was followed up by another strange speech in which she asserted that "caring about people" included repeal of the Affordable Care Act because it would literally kill women, children and senior citizens.

Achievements

• In 2012, WND awarded her "Woman of the Year" because she represents "goodness, womanliness, perseverance and character".

A future career in track and field...

It seems she has become increasingly fond of leading reporters on impromptu jogging sessions provoked by questions being asked about the congressional investigation into her 2012 Presidential campaign. Other than the Dana Bash incident, she decided that another instant track meet needed to break out when a reporter brought up the issue again less than a month later after concerns and information resurfaced. Her staffers (loyal, if not exceptionally bright) did a stellar job blocking for her on the ensuing faux punt return. Rather than answer the questions like somebody with nothing to hide would, she allowed herself to be protected by the staffer phalanx and claimed the inquiry was spearheaded by Democrats who saw her as "enemy number one", even though all the information was coming from her own 2012 campaign staff.

Bachmann may have to pick up the pace of her jogging routine. In addition to the aforementioned Federal inquiries, former chief of staff Andy Parrish told the Iowa Senate through an affidavit that her Presidential campaign made illegal third-party payments to Iowa State Senator Kent Sorenson as well.

...or not

As of May 17th, 2013, the FBI has also joined in on the investigative fun.

Stupid staff stunts

Her legislative director Javier Sanchez was arrested in July 2013 for allegedly burglarizing the offices of other members of the House of Representatives for reasons apparently not connected too much in the way of financial gain. Feel free to draw your own conclusions about that.

Post-legislative hijinks

Bachmann left the House of Representatives in January 2015, but has kept up her campaign for insane statements public discourse by declaring that Barack Obama and gay marriage will be the cause of the rapture.

In 2018, Bachmann expressed interest in running for the United States Senate seat being vacated by Al Franken following Franken's resignation in light of several sexual misconduct accusations. However, she ultimately decided against running because apparently, God didn't want her to.

During her stint in Congress, Bachmann, like the rest of the Tea Party, closely followed the John Birch Society ideology. After leaving office, she joined former-Bircher Pastor David Noebel's church.

Stopped clock

Bachmann is probably one of the few apeshit insane conservatives who couldn't care less about birthers. When asked about Barack Obama's birth certificate on Good Morning America by George Stephanopoulos, Bachmann said that its release "should settle the matter", that "I take the President at his word", and that "We have bigger fish to fry".

See also

• Bradlee Dean
• Christians for Michele Bachmann Not to be confused with a group that actually supports Michele.
• Marjorie Taylor Greene - A newer Representative and even more of an extremist.

External links

• Dump Bachmann - a blog dedicated to recording her crazy antics and preventing her reelection.
• Michele Bachmann will appeal to those who like Sarah Palin but wish she would be a little less intellectual.
• "All Christian-y and Bright"Zina Saunders of Mother Jones wrote a hymn to Michelle.
• A list of the craziest things she's said, including terrifying video footage.
• More whackaloon fun: The Best of Bachmann
• Michele Bachmann's 5 Wildest Predictions. All of which didn't come true.

References

2012 United States presidential election articles on RationalWiki

Topics: Affordable Care Act - Benghazi attack - Debate:Religious beliefs and public office - Same-sex marriage - United States Electoral College
Parties: Americans Elect - Constitution Party - Democratic Party - Green Party of the United States - Libertarian Party - Prohibition Party - Republican Party (primaries • Tea Party)
Candidates: Bachmann (R) - Cain (R) - Gingrich (R) - Johnson (Lib) - Obama (D) - Perry (R) - Paul (R) - Romney (R) - Santorum (R) - Stein (Green) • Running mates: Biden (D) - Ryan (R)
Winner: Barack Obama (incumbent)