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Bye bye Bachmann - By Joan Walsh
With scandals swirling, the Tea Party darling says she won’t seek re-election – but it’s not about those scandals!
BY JOAN WALSH
Oh Michele Bachmann, leaving Congress the way she spent every day of it – awkwardly, and with a wide, toothy, slightly inappropriate smile.
“I have decided next year I will not seek a fifth Congressional term,” she declared in a friendly eight-minute video on her campaign Web site. “This decision was not impacted in any way by the recent inquiries into the activities of my former presidential campaign or my former presidential staff.” Bachmann also insisted her departure had nothing to do with polls showing that Jim Graves, the Democrat she barely defeated last year, currently holds a two-point lead.
That’s so Bachmann: All smiles and chirpy optimism, she’s going to tell you up front that the swirling scandal and her dropping poll numbers aren’t the reason behind her departure – when they are precisely the reason.
Bachmann came to national public attention when she told Hardball’s Chris Matthews in 2008 that she thought the media ought to investigate the anti-American views of the Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama. That wasn’t all: “I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out: Are they pro-America or anti-America?” Our 21st century Joe McCarthy had arrived, in a perfectly highlighted helmet of hair and bright lipstick.
She became a self-anointed leader of the fledgling Tea Party that next year, and ably represented its toxic blend of fear and misunderstanding: anti-Obama, anti-government spending, anti-science. She accused Obama of running a “gangster government,” suggested a cluster of 2011 earthquakes and hurricanes were God’s punishment for the “morbid obesity diet” of federal spending, and maybe most famously, insisted the HPV vaccine caused “mental retardation.” Who can forget when she was chosen (or chose herself?) to deliver the official Tea Party response to the 2011 State of the Union address – and spent the entire time staring a little alarmingly at the wrong camera?. In some ways, that was the beginning of the end for Bachmann as national leader – but she ran for president anyway.
full article
http://www.salon.com/2013/05/29/bye_bye_bachmann/
20 replies
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Don't eat hot dogs in public, particularly large ones. It's not a good visual.
It's not that they shouldn't be able to eat a hot dog, but the media will have endless fun with the image. Particularly with one as large as the one that Bachmann is eating in that pic.
I wonder what he was thinking.
Good catch, Don! 
