GOP Candidate Breakdown #2: Michele Bachmann (as featured on www.nuzcom.com)

Michele Bachmann.  Sigh.  Alright, let's get through this.

Age: 55, but probably made a pact with Lucifer to live forever.  This may drain on Social Security and Medicare.

Hometown:  Again, its a tricky one, but she was physically born in Waterloo, Iowa.  She represents a district in Minnesota in the House of Representatives.

Place in Republican Party:  She wears three hats.  First, she's most closely associated with the Tea Party movement (after all, she did found the Tea Party Caucus).  However, she's also an evangelical Christian and votes based on what the Bible tells her and what her church teaches as opposed to the reality of the situation and she's a vote in Congress that does everything that she can to retard the efforts of the Obama Administration.

Polls:  NH:  She's behind Romney (everyone is), and her chances here aren't that great.  The voters tend to go for the relatively sensible candidate.  John McCain in 2000 and 2008, George H.W. Bush in '88.  They were candidates who are capable of appealing to the center.  Bachmann doesn't have that savoir faire.

IA:  She's leading here (for now).  She's got two advantages.  She's originally from Iowa (her second announcement for president was in her hometown) so there's a perceived home court advantage, but also her religious zealotry has an appeal to core GOP voters.  Also, she's coming across as a candidate that would do well in caucus states and situations.  And you know who else was great in caucus votes?  Barack Obama.

SC:  Again, Romney leads the pack, but her Christianity can be played up here to great effect.  Also, if SC switches to a caucus this year, she stands a decent chance.

NV:  She shouldn't bother with this place.  It's so sewed up for Romney, it's not funny.  Also, there's Las Vegas.  Sin City.  And if Bachmann is going to scream and run away because of two lesbians wanting to ask her a question, her head's going to explode when she see's the Strip.

The first thing that I would like to point out is that no sitting Representative has lead a successful campaign to the White House.  Ever.  Your usual springboard positions are Vice-President, Senator, Governor and, on the occasion, a General.  So, statistics are against Bachmann from the beginning, but I'm sure she would ignore something like math.

To borrow a joke from Lewis Black, Michele Bachmann smiles so much, I don't believe that she has a central nervous system.  I have evidence to back this up.  There are three things that Bachmann is primarily known for:

1.  Saying stupid, stupid things.  The following are pulled from PolitiFact, a fact-checking website.  These are listed as "false" statements or "pants on fire" statements.  The latter signifies that the statement isn't just wrong, it's a lie.  I'm going to pull three at random:

Says the Constitution only requires her to tell the census "how many people are in our home."  Pants on Fire.  And she instructed her constituents to not fill out the census, which I wish that they would have done because that meant that the GOP in MN would have erased her district.  After all, there's not that many people living there... all of a sudden...

In the 1970s, "the swine flu broke out . . . under another Democrat, President Jimmy Carter."  Pants on Fire.  It was Gerald Ford.  And I'm pretty sure that Swine Flu doesn't give a shit as to who is in the White House.

"Secretary Geithner has left the option on the table" of abandoning the dollar for a multinational currency.  False.  Just... just, wrong.  Who told her that?  Who tells her these things?

And it's not just that she's wrong.  She's allowed to be wrong.  But when she's told that she's wrong, she doubles down, a la George W. Bush.  

Take the issue of her statement that the Founding Fathers fought tirelessly to end slavery (spoiler alert: they didn't).  When this objective fact is pointed out to her, she says "Oh, no, YOU'RE wrong!  Because there is John Quincy Adams and he fought against slavery.  He worked hard during the Revolution and was certainly a Founding Father."

Now, generally speaking to be considered a Founding Father, you are someone who signed the Declaration of Independence or were present at the debates of the Constitutional Convention.  John Quincy Adams did neither.  BECAUSE HE WAS 9 WHEN THE DECLARATION WAS SIGNED.

So, if Mrs. Bachmann becomes President and is dealing in foreign affairs and she confuses India and Pakistan, is she going to correct the Indian Minister?  If she's talking with a group of scientists about global warming, if she's speaking with men and women that have made it their life's work to study climate change and the affects that humanity has on the weather, is she going to flat-out tell them that their wrong because God told her that she was right?  

2.  Intense and deplorable hatred of homosexuals and those that tolerate the homosexual lifestyle.   Her husband, Marcus Bachmann runs a "clinic" in MN that tells you to "pray the gay away".  It rhymes so it must be correct!  She's not a favorite among the gay community, probably because she has called the lifestyle "living in bondage" and akin to Satan, I think Fred Karger (the log cabin Republican that's running against Romney) should actually focus on Bachmann.  The whole thing is enough to make Jesus Christ shake his head and say "I'm positive I mentioned something about loving each other."

3.  She's allowed to be a bigot.  She's allowed to be ignorant.  She's allowed to be a powerful and ignorant bigot.  But she completely lacks any sort of intellectual curiosity.  That's what makes Obama refreshing from Bush.  If Obama doesn't know something, he's the kind of guy that would go look it up and then draw a conclusion.  Bachmann already has the conclusion, and is going to go find some facts that are going to support her ideas.  It's why she supports the teaching of Intelligent Design in the classroom (also says that there are several Nobel Prize winning scientists that back her up.  Guess what?  She can't name one.  Because they don't exist.)  She said, when she announced that she was running for president in Waterloo, IA (the second announcement she made that she was running for president), that everything that she ever learned was in Waterloo. 

This is a ridiculous notion.  The concept that the people in a small town can have the right plan to run a nation of 300 million or that they would be able to get along (or against) the rest of the billions of people on the planet is just silly.  The idea that the right way is somehow attained in Small Town USA and that the big cities and Washington DC are ignorant to this is just stupid and detrimental to the entire process.

Instead, the solutions come from open, honest dialogue.  This cannot happen in echo chambers in small towns or big cities. The real question that we should be asking ourselves is whether or not we are capable of having an honest dialogue at all.  

Now, watch Bachmann in an interview.  See how fast she answers questions and see how she never hesitates.  Thoughtful people hesitate.  Considerate people hesitate.  Blockheads do not hesitate.  They shoot first and ask questions later.

Bachmann is not a good choice for President, for the GOP or for anybody.  As a general observation, there's little doubt in my mind that Bachmann is going to appeal to hard-core conservatives, but the General Election is not about appealing to the base, it's convincing everyone else, the Independents and even the liberals and progressives.  She'll flounder and I doubt that she'll get the nomination.  She'll pick up some delegates, maybe even enough to bargain with at the convention.  But the GOP has to think about the long term not just the nomination.