DownWithTyranny!: In re. Bachmann v. Reality: Just possibly there IS a Line of Craziness beyond which right-wingers mustn't venture

Has "Batso" Bachmann really said anything battier than she's said in the past? Still, she has clearly crossed some line. I just wish I knew what it was.

"It remains to be seen whether Bachmann has done enough to cause herself any problems in the November election. What she has done is torpedoed any political capital she might have had left over from her brief moment in the spotlight during the GOP presidential nominating contest last year."

-- Aaron Blake, in "How Michele Bachmann finally jumped the shark," on washingtonpost.com's "The Fix" blog

by Ken

Howie just dealt with some of the practical ins and outs of the surprisingly stern reaction to Michele "Batso" Bachmann's latest public wig-out. I say "surprisingly" stern because I've been coming to believe that there really isn't anything that right-wingers can't say, now that they have what appears to be official and unlimited license to spew any damned delusion or lie that pops into their heads.

I'm sure I've tried the patience of readers by coming back repeatedly to this point: that in the 21st century, it is apparently officially okay that every word that comes out of the mouth of every right-winger can be presumed to be untrue. I apologize, but I can't get my mind unblown over this. I haven't even recovered from the 2008 presidential campaign in which candidate Young Johnny McCranky got through the entire carnival without ever saying a word that wasn't a lie. Which was an even greater challenge than might be apparent, since McCranky had a minimum of two positions on every issue, and frequently more -- and even so he managed to cast them all in the form of lies. You'd think there would be some sort of prize for this. (And I'm not suggesting the White House.)

So from my standpoint what's interesting about the current pushback Batso is getting isn't whether she can survive it but the fact that she's getting it at all. Of course what she said had to say about the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran and Rep. Keith Ellison and Hilary Clinton aide Huma Abedin is batshit crazy and an unmitigated disgrace, for which she ought to be reviled by every person of minimal sense and decency. But what the heck is new about that? For how many years now has this been true of everything that comes out of her maw? And, for that matter, out of the mouths of most every cog in the Right-Wing Noise Machine. On Fox Noise, for example, it's known in technical terms as "our programming." I mean, if all such content were banished from its cable waves, it would be reduced to a test pattern. Or maybe Yule Log, without the Yule log. (They could probably afford to buy a Yule log, though.)

Fortunately, I think, someone has actually attempted to show us how Batso's current round of blithering is different from, well, her usual kind. Interestingly, it's not washingtonpost.com Fixmaster Chris Cillizza attempting this feat of analysis but Aaron Blake, who sets the stage thusly (minus links, which you can find onsite):

Rep. Michele Bachmann is no stranger to controversy or -- as we found during the GOP presidential primary -- stretching the truth.

In fact, the fact-checking Web site Politifact has rated 31 of Bachmann’s public statements to be either “false” or even worse — “pants on fire” — one of the worst records of any politician. And The Washington Post’s great Fact-Checker blog gave her four Pinocchios on six different occasions during the GOP presidential primary.

Today, though, for arguably the first time in her congressional career, the Minnesota GOP congresswoman is finding herself publicly on the outs with some in her own party. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), among others, have publicly criticized Bachmann for her suggestion that State Department officials, including longtime Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin, might be part of a Muslim Brotherhood conspiracy to infiltrate the U.S. government. (Though notably, Newt Gingrich defended her this morning.)

So what gives? Why did Bachmann, whose history of bending the truth and saying controversial things has already been well-documented, finally go too far for her colleagues?

And by golly, our Aaron, brave soul, sets out "a few reasons that we can surmise."

First, "she's got a profile now," from her preisdential run, which included her Iowa straw-poll triumph, whihc puts her "in the illustrious company" of "a group that includes Mitt Romney, George W. Bush, Bob Dole and George H.W. Bush."

With that heft comes more attention, and suddenly the things she says are not just the musings of some back-bench member of Congress but a Republican who actually got some real traction with the GOP base against the likes of Romney. That makes the things she says potentially more harmful to her party.

Okay, but "her party" is at present a collection of pathological liars and mental defectives. How is Batso's blithering to be distinguished from theirs?

Aaron will actually have something to say on this subject, give or take, but first he calls attention to "the GOP's reaction":

Bachmann’s letter, which was co-signed by four other House members, wasn’t big news until McCain took to the Senate floor and eviscerated her.

“These attacks on Huma have no logic, no basis and no merit. And they need to stop now,” McCain said, according to prepared remarks.

Suddenly, members of her own party were no longer standing idly by . . . .

And after McCranky ("one of the biggest voices in the GOP today") came "Sunny John" Boehner and "the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee" (who would be the egregious Mike Rogers, who goes unnamed). Well, pardon my astonishment, but I don't believe that any human being has ever told more lies than the Crankyman, whose relationship to the truth is . . . wait, does he have a relationship to the truth? (Perhaps "against"?) And Boehner? Boehner?

Yet apparently these people matter. To the extent that:

Democrats can attack Bachmann all day; the moment that Republicans with such stature enter the fray against their GOP colleague, it becomes big news.

The boldface emphasis is added, and I hope I don't have to explain why. I can't help feeling that this is in fact the most important sentence in Aaron's piece, not least because it appears to be true. It really and truly doesn't matter what's said by Democrats, or perhaps more usefully by anyone whom the Bush regimistas famously disparaged as denizens of "the reality-based community." The reality-basers can talk till they turn blue, they can do handstands and cartwheels, they can provide mountains of documentation, and none of it matters. Nope, it only matters when people of the stature of McCranky and Sunny John and "Anonymous" Rogers step up to the microphones.

Wait, did someone say "stature"? "Stature"? Young Johnny? Boehner? Rogers? These people have what passes for stature? I'm starting to regret bringing the whole thing up.

But let's forge ahead with Aaron. Surmised reason no. 3 for Batso's undoing: "the target." Humn Abedin "is very close to the Clintons and has a great reputation in Washington, even among Republicans and the media." And "perhaps just as importantly," she earned waves of sympathy from the humiliation she fell into via the shenanigans of hubby Anthony Weiner. So she has "lots of friends, McCain being one of them, who aren't going to stand idly by" when she's attacked by the likes of Batso, who -- "unlike her previous brushes with controversy" - "is suddenly outmanned." Now on the subject of Batso and outmanning, I think we can all make our little jokes, many of them featuring her now-and-forever unmanned husband (who, as we all know, is not not not gay). But let's try to keep some focus as we move on to reason no. 4, "the severity of the charge":

All of the above aside, what Bachmann is alleging is on a whole new level from her previous allegations. While she alleged in 2007 that Iran had plans to turn parts of Iraq into a terrorist haven, accusing U.S. government officials of being involved in a terrorist conspiracy is different.

The former charge may not pass the smell test or be based on any public evidence, but it’s not too far afield that many would disbelieve it. After all, Iran is the bad guy.

The latter would be a scandal the likes of which this country has rarely -- if ever -- seen. And Bachmann is making the allegation against American citizens.

This is probably true, I guess. And it's probably only my perception that it's not wildly different from the kinds of liberal conspiracies regularly denounced in the echo chambers of the Right-Wing Noise Machine, and yes, including right-wing government officials (like all those House Republicans), who can be thought to be holdable to a higher standard of responsibility. That higher standard, however, seems to me entirely theoretical.

I don't know. It's all laid out here, but I don't really see what distinguishes Batso's present blithering from all that preceded it -- and not just from her, of course, but from the whole of the divorced-from-reality Right. And yet clearly the Batwoman has crossed a line, somewhere. The closest I can see is that she aimed her guns at someone who "has a great reputation," among such seemingly different constituencies as (a) the Clintons, (b) Republicans, and (c) media. I suppose it could be pointed out that these aren't really such different constituencies. This might be perceived as the Village closing ranks.

So that could be a lesson. At the very least we can come away with this lesson, which seems to me to bear repeating: