Bachmann has close to “Unsinkable” status”<\/a> and thought briefly that perhaps Mindeman – who is one of the more estimable regional leftybloggers – was going to try something we’d not seen before; a sober, responsible, dispassionate look from the left at the success of one of the most drearily, rotely, predictably maligned figures in Minnesota politics.<\/p>\nIf you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, or know anything about Minnesota politics, you already know not to take any action on that <\/em>bet.<\/p>\nAny post that starts with a Paul Krugman quote is off to a bad start, of course:<\/p>\n
The point is that the takeover of the Republican Party by the irrational right is no laughing matter. Something unprecedented is happening here \u2014 and it\u2019s very bad for America<\/em>.– Paul Krugman (NY Times)<\/p><\/blockquote>\nSo sit down with someone like\u00a0 Paul Krugman, a Lori Sturdevant or, I’ll take a wild flyer here, a Dave Mindemann and ask them “what would the “rational right” look like?”.\u00a0 If they get past the stumbling and the phumphering (I give you about one-to-four odds), they’ll describe something that looks, talks and votes indistinguishably from a Democrat.<\/p>\n
Because, to these people, everything to the right of Dave Durenberger or Chuck Hagel is not just putatively wrong; it’s “crazy”.<\/p>\n
Mindemann:<\/p>\n
Outside of Bill Prendergast at MN Progressive Project (as well as some of the local 6th District bloggers like Hal Kimball and Political Muse), a lot of left leaning writers and activists (including myself) have considered Michele Bachmann to be a kook or extremist. [Really?\u00a0 The hell you say. I’d put it more like “every regional leftyblogger has “Bachmann is teh crazee” on a hotkey – Ed<\/em>.] Someone to make a caricature of, but not somebody to accept as a spokesperson for the right on the scale that she has nurtured.<\/p>\nThat has to change, because Michele Bachmann is beginning to remind me of someone else….someone much more sinister….<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Who might that be?<\/p>\n
Margaret Thatcher, who presaged Ronald Reagan by fighting against not only a blinkered, ossified liberal leadership with immense success, but countered countless scabrous insults about her state of mine – because the British left was no less prone to see dissent as a mental illess as our own left?<\/p>\n
Sarah Palin, whose own struggle with media\/left (pardon the redundancy) orthodoxy has so completely paralleled that of Bachman (and Thatcher!)?<\/p>\n
Who, pray tell?<\/p>\n
Joe McCarthy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
{{facepalm}}<\/p>\n
Wow.\u00a0 Never heard that one before.<\/p>\n
McCarthy rose to prominence because of fear. Fear of communism, the red menace. He turned those fears into an irrational paranoia. It ruined lives and paralyzed the US government. For a time, everyone had to tread carefully around the potential accusations that came out of McCarthy’s committee.<\/p>\n
Bachmann is becoming the icon that the paranoid right is turning to now. She equates their fears into a “fight for freedom” or a “war against tyranny”. This new paranoia is not about real fears but about a loss of power that eight years of President Bush and 6 years of a Republican Congress kept in check.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Wow.\u00a0 Speaking of paranoia.<\/p>\n
Mindemann’s piece is marinaded in a crock-put full of the modern left’s most durable, and durably predictable, memes:<\/p>\n
\n- To a liberal, a conservative never, ever fights the culture war because they have concerns and they wanna take their shot at correcting what they see as a problem in society.\u00a0 It’s always about “fear”.<\/li>\n
- No matter how carefully, even punctiliously, a cultural or social (or, these days, even a fiscal or security) conservative spells out a case, they are without exception “paranoid”.<\/li>\n
- It is impossible for a conservative to speak on any issue, in any rhetorical terms, without it being considered “hate” on one level or another.<\/li>\n
- Any conservative thought is assumed to immediately link to the most ludicrously extreme possible end results – and the most ludicrious fringe is inevitably concatenated with the most mainstream conservative thought.\u00a0 This is not just intellectual laziness (although in the case of most lefty pundits, it certainly is the path of least resistance); this is part of a concerted pattern on the part of the left to frame all <\/em>disagreement as one form of depravity or amother.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
This is the lens through which the left – not even the extreme left, mind you, but the mainstream left that got Barack Obama elected – sees all dissent, and into which they want to frame all dissent for everyone else.\u00a0 Too much of the media accepts it as the baseline; much of the American left can’t be bothered to question it.<\/p>\n
That’s gone, and now their paranoia has a face and its quite different from the faces they have been used to.<\/p>\n
Michele Bachmann has become the rallying point for this new paranoia. She listens to them…she understands them….she IS one of them. When she calls them to Washington to stand against health care, they come. Never mind that a lot of that crowd was paid for by astroturf front groups. The fact that deep pocket astroturf groups are willing to bankroll a Bachmann rally makes her all the more dangerous.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Mindemann is shocked, shocked<\/em>, that right-leaning groups spend money to get across right-leaning messages and support right-leaning causes.\u00a0 Because goodness knows the entire left-wing slander machine is funded through bake sales.<\/p>\nShe has an entire news channel (Fox News) at her disposal.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Because goodness knows the left gets short shrift on ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, the NYTimes, WaPo, LATimes, the AP, Reuters…<\/p>\n
Her message can reach the people it needs to anytime she chooses. She is also recognized as an “official” opposition voice by other media as well. And she loves the attention, doesn’t care about “facts”, and makes it all personal.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Tangent alert:\u00a0 I was at a town hall meeting in Saint Paul before the ’08 election featuring Elwyn “E-Tink” Tinklenberg and Bachmann.\u00a0 E-Tink spoke in vague blandishments, and seemed about as sincere and connected to the moment as the moaning in a porn video.\u00a0\u00a0 Bachmann, on the other hand, did something I’ve never seen a pol do; she grabbed a whiteboard and a marker, and she started putting up the numbers; the amount of Porkulus; the morgage bailout; the upcoming, inevitable bailouts of other industries; the amount this’d add to our per-capita deficit figure, and what that meant not only to our paychecks, but to our children’s futures…<\/p>\n
…in short, the facts. <\/em>She not only waded through the numbers, but she made them – the facts<\/em> – accessible to everyone in the room.\u00a0 It was the most affecting explanation of the gravity of our current fiscal situation that I had seen to date<\/em>, <\/strong>and just about the most effective I’ve ever seen, period. From anyone, in or out <\/em>of politics.\u00a0 Ever<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\nAs to anyone on the left – the party of Saul Alinski – carping about a politician “making it personal?”\u00a0 I’ll hold my tongue, so that my contempt doesn’t overtake me.<\/p>\n
And dare I say it, she has a certain charisma that convinces her supporters she can do no wrong.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
No.\u00a0 She has a charisma that convinces her supporters – and even a few intellectually honest detractors – that she’s right.<\/p>\n
The Democrats chance to defeat her was in 2008. They had the right candidate [um, no – E-Tink was a disaster – Ed.<\/em>] and the right opportunity [True – Ed.<\/em>] — it just all came together too late.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n(Also incorrect, if\u00a0 you’ll indulge the tangent; “it”, in the form of a Keith Olbermann interview about not much that got its context carefully doctored and blown up into a much-ado-about-not-much-ado\u00a0 event by an uncritical all-too-compliant media – “came together” too early; Bachmann was able to get The Real Michele back in front of the voters in enough time to stanch the bleeding.\u00a0 Thank God.<\/p>\n
Tarryl Clark is an excellent candidate [Hah! – Ed.<\/em>]. So is Maureen Reed. Clark could be a consistent winner for the DFL…..just not in the 6th District. I doubt Reed or Clark is prepared for the type of war they are about to embark on. The DFL candidate, whomever it is, is taking on an incumbant that now has an unlimited national war chest of funding…An incumbant who can call on high profile names to support her campaign.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nWhich is apparently only a bad thing when the\u00a0 “high profile names” don’t come from Hollywood and the\u00a0 “unlimited war chest” isn’t from George Soros.<\/p>\n
An incumbant who will be protected by a national party that has become dependent on her followers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Which is a pejorative way of saying “found its conservative voice and unifying principles” – the only voice and principles since the Great Depression that has led the party to any sustained success and impact on politics, in 1980 and 1994.<\/p>\n
Which, frankly, terrifies the crap out of the Democrat establishment.\u00a0 This is why the left and media (pardon the redundancy) push the meme of the “responsble” (inevitably “moderate”) Republican – in their world, Dede Scozzafava and Arne Carlson are the voice <\/em>of the GOP! – to divide and then to conquer the party, to marginalize conservatism and conservatives.<\/p>\nBecause we not only win, but we win against all odds and conventional wisdom.<\/p>\n
Mindemann comes oh-so-close to an answer…<\/p>\n
Is the state DFL prepared to meet that kind of challenge? I have my doubts. They can treat MB as a buffoon, but it will only enhance her appeal. Their candidates have shown an ability to raise some money but nowhere near the amounts needed to compete with Bachmann.<\/p>\n
I hope I’m wrong. I hope that the 6th District has enough discerning voters that she can be defeated.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
…but swerves away.<\/p>\n
The worst thing you can do in any form of public life is to “believe your own press”.\u00a0 Likewise with memes about ones opponents.\u00a0 When conservatives start to write their opponents off as a bunch of gutless entitlement symps and lumpen government employees – and all too many conservatives fall into that trap, too – then it takes ones’ edge off.\u00a0 You should never underestimate your opponent.<\/p>\n
But the only real arrow in the left’s quiver in the Sixth District is <\/em>underestimation to the point of collective slander, not only of Representative Bachmann.\u00a0 The left’s entire point of view about Rep. Bachmann is framed by a years-long propaganda campaign waged by some of her most, let’s just say, “focused” destractors, people who find her social conservatism anathema to the point they lose their faculties of reasoning.\u00a0 This has framed the entire 6th CD DFL’s thought on Rep. Bachmann – a myopia that can only have helped send Rep. Bachmann to Washington twice now.<\/p>\nDave Mindemann – do you honestly think that Rep. Bachmman’s successive victories, in two of the most anti-Republican elections in 35 years, was the result of “undiscerning voters”?<\/p>\n
Voters of the Sixth – to Dave Mindemann (oh, I’ll be fair – to the Institutional Left), you are nothing but half-trained lab animals in a pavlovian experiment designed by that most devious mind-warper, Karl Rove.<\/p>\n
Not people who arrive at intelligent conclusions for reasons of your own.<\/p>\n
Hold that thought for another year.<\/p>\n
But at this moment, that seems nearly impossible.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
And one is torn between hoping Mindemann, and the rest of the state and 6CD DFL, do and\/or do not figure why.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I joke, constantly, with liberal commenters and critics – the few that are worth engaging, anyway – “If a princpled conservative orders a pizza in the woods, and no liberal is there to hear it, is he\/she still crazy?” It’s a joke that covers a very serious reality; for a big chunk of the left, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60,16,79],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign-10","category-conservatism","category-slander-files"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6205"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6205\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6208,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6205\/revisions\/6208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}