06.22.11
The Triumph of the American Dumbshit
In Schuylkill County I grew up with people are now the Michele Bachmann demographic. They became the Tea Party.
Matt Taibbi profiles Bachmann in Rolling Stone this week.
He astutely notes that in 2011 America, laughing at the dumbshits on television for being dumbshits only makes them stronger. And before you know it, the most camera-genic and determined among them is running for President.
When you laugh at Michele Bachmann for going on MSNBC and blurting out that the moon is made of red communist cheese, these people don’t learn that she is wrong. What they learn is that you’re a dick, that they hate you more than ever, and that they’re even more determined now to support anyone who promises not to laugh at their own visions and fantasies.
Given how Bachmann’s stature rises every time she does something we laugh at, it’s no wonder she’s set her strangely unfocused eyes on the White House. Since arriving in Congress, she has been a human tabloid-copy machine, spouting one copy-worthy lunacy after another. She launched a fierce campaign against compact fluorescent lights, claiming that the energy-saving bulbs contain mercury and pose a “very real threat to children, disabled people, pets, senior citizens.” She blasted the 2010 census as a government plot and told people not to comply because the U.S. Constitution doesn’t require citizens to participate, when in fact it does …
[And they listened to her. The census enumerators saw it, even in Pasadena.]
Even other Republicans, it seems, are making the mistake of laughing at Bachmann. But consider this possibility: She wins Iowa, then swallows the Tea Party and Christian vote whole for the next 30 or 40 primaries while Romney and Pawlenty battle fiercely over who is the more “viable” boring-white-guy candidate. Then Wall Street blows up again — and it’s Barack Obama and a soaring unemployment rate versus a white, God-fearing mother of 28 from the heartland.
It could happen. Michele Bachmann has found the flaw in the American Death Star. She is a television camera’s dream, a threat to do or say something insane at any time, the ultimate reality-show protagonist. She has brilliantly piloted a media system that is incapable of averting its eyes from a story, riding that attention to an easy conquest of an overeducated cultural elite from both parties that is far too full of itself to understand the price of its contemptuous laughter. All of those people out there aren’t voting for Michele Bachmann. They’re voting against us. And to them, it turns out, we suck enough to make anyone a contender.
Taibbi, in his last paragraph, is ridiculing those I’ve called the “good boys.”
MSNBC, for example, is just about the best thing that happened to Michele Bachmann.
From the Nation’s Chris Hayes to the the Post’s Gene Robinson, the “good boys” are always on the network, always on hand to laugh at the lunatics for the sake of some good sport while the country slowly burns.
The lunatics, who know this only makes them stronger, went and got elected in 2010 and continued sacking the country.
Good boy Chris Matthews is one of the people who regularly tries to pour all the all the contempt he can on Bachmann. It never seems to occur to him that, on TV, he appears as a creature just as easily despised.
And that’a made clear in the clips featuring him and Bachmann in my “Act Naturally” vid here.
Good news, lads. The Hitler Downfall segment is removed. No more YouTube ad monetization!