Hey, it’s Ron Gold here:
One of the most out-of-touch-with-reality Congresspeople is Rep. Michele Bachmann, a Minnesota Republican. She was first elected in 2006 after claiming God told her to run for office, which she explained during a speech at a church:
“Twenty-two months ago, He called me to run for United States Congress. And my husband thought, you need to do this. This is a big deal to do something like this. So we set aside three days where we fasted and we prayed, and long about the afternoon of day two, we knew. We knew that we knew that we knew. This was it. And so we jumped in, and little did we know that out of 435 seats for Congress, this race would turn in to being one of the top three in the country.”
Now in her second term, Bachmann has entertained the country with one high profile embarrassment after another. Essentially, her agenda is to instill her Fundamentalist ideals on the country (she thinks evolution is bullshit, homosexuals are sexual deviants who target children, and that the Christian God wants America to destroy radical Islam) and start another Red Scare (she told Chris Matthews that the media should investigate politicians for anti-Americanism).
Like her or hate her, you have to admit Bachmann is an expert at claiming the spotlight. And not surprisingly, she’s found yet another way to get back in the public eye, this time by comparing a proposed expansion of the AmeriCorps program with Communist re-education camps. She said this on a local radio show (audio here):
It’s under the guise of — quote — volunteerism. But it’s not volunteers at all. It’s paying people to do work on behalf of government. …
I believe that there is a very strong chance that we will see that young people will be put into mandatory service. And the real concerns is that there are provisions for what I would call re-education camps for young people, where young people have to go and get trained in a philosophy that the government puts forward and then they have to go to work in some of these politically correct forums.
The funny thing is how I never get the least bit angry at Bachmann’s paranoid, reactionary declarations. In fact, I would even consider myself a fan of hers. Right now, she’s little more than a benign straw person for Fundamentalism. If anything, she probably turns people away from her political stances.
Of course, the thought of President Bachmann is scary as hell, but as long as she is a comically-marginalized voice in a minority party, I say keep her talking.
