Crazy Embodied

Twenty-twelve is just around the corner, and the number of emails I've received from the Obama campaign for re-election has exceeded absurdity.  I delete indiscriminately.  I'm not exactly chomping at the bit to contribute to our President's bid, read his staffers' long-winded sales pitches, or support the impotence of the democrats in general.

The disappointment I feel with Barrack is nearly insurmountable.  That being said, I continue to be appalled by the the right wing in our country, and I am truly afraid of some of the people the Republicans somehow consider normal and/or mainstream.  Case in point: Michele Bachmann.  Michele Bachmann?!  I say it twice because it is surreal.  They have got to be kidding.  I don't really know how this woman has remained an elected official since 2003, and the fact that she is a legitimate potential for the party nomination says so much about our current political state, and it's a sad tale to tell indeed.  Let's review some of my favorite Bachmann tidbits.  She thinks Americorps fakes volunteerism but actually runs "re-education camps" that recruit and indoctrinate our youth to be crusaders of political-correctness and government agendas.  (read: her son was accepted into and joined Teach for America shortly after she said this.  Props, Harrison Bachmann.) During the healthcare debate, she declared that the extremely watered-down version of "Obamacare" as well as its inceptor sought to annihilate us through acorn and the healthcare legislation.  Her statements have frequently crossed the line from nutty into dangerous.  In 2010, she encouraged her constituents and the American public to boycott the census because she felt that it was unconstitutional.  Forget the fact that the census is directly sanctioned in the first article of...wait for it...the constitution. (duh) She preaches to the government (right after cashing her congressional paycheck) to stand down and stay completely out of her life and her business, yet her family's farm receives tens of thousands of dollars each year in subsidies.  Meanwhile, she deems all government programs designed to help people less fortunate than her as full-on socialism.  Apparently government handouts to rich white people is capitalism at its finest, but anything else makes us a bunch of communists.  By the way, those same farm subsidies, mostly in the form of corn subsidies, are directly responsible for famine after famine all over the developing world, but that's an entirely different story.  So, not only does our national agriculture policy prevent people all over the world from feeding themselves, it also lines the pockets of the bootstrap slinging, government-hating {fill in the blank}s we continue to elect into public office.  Outrageous doesn't begin to cover it.  

My main question is essentially this: how can anyone take her seriously?  It's true that all politicians are just that, a bunch of politicians, but Bachmann is a fringe figure at best and she is really being considered as a possible presidential candidate.  She's an extremist, there's no getting around that, and as the tea party amasses a death-eater-like mobilization (their policy agenda is based on fear and ignorance, and I'm convinced that their leadership is pure evil), Barrack continues to marginalize the left.  If he loses the general election it won't be because of the swing voters, the tea party, or any other group that they say matters in the news.  It will be because of the disenchanted libs and young people who have stopped adding to his coffers and, dare I say it, may not bother to vote the second time around.   For the love of God, Dems, try to pull it together.  I don't want to live in a country where this woman is considered half-way normal.  There's no nice way for me to spin it; she's nuts.