If you haven’t seen it, Rolling Stone has a long profile of Michele Bachmann that’s filled with the sort of casual misogyny that the Liberal media just can’t seem to get enough of these days. If the beginning of the piece is filled with lines like “Bachmann is a religious zealot whose brain is a raging electrical storm of divine visions and paranoid delusions,” you know it’s probably not going to get any better. When Matt Taibbi, the author, isn’t writing that “[Bachmann]‘s trying to look like June Cleaver, but she actually looks like the T2 skeleton posing for a passport photo,” he’s ominously warning his readers that “this hard-charging challenger for the GOP nomination is a rare breed of political psychopath, equal parts crazed Divine Wind kamikaze-for-Jesus and calculating, six-faced Machiavellian prevaricator. Whatever she is, she’s no joke.”
That brings us to the real problem with this piece. As Abe Sauer has already pointed out, why should the reader take Bachmann seriously if Taibbi himself refuses to do so? It seems like it’s much easier for him to write stuff like this instead: “In modern American politics, being the right kind of ignorant and entertainingly crazy is like having a big right hand in boxing; you’ve always got a puncher’s chance. And Bachmann is exactly the right kind of completely bats–t crazy.”
Sauer also notes that the profile has remarkably little original material, having lifted most of its quotes from local Minnesota blogs and publications, originally without attribution (Rolling Stone has since added more citation links).
To top it all off, here is a video of Taibbi on Imus in the Morning yesterday, when he said, “I’m actually kind of rooting for her to win the nomination, because I can’t wait to see the porn movies that they make.” As of this post, the National Organization for Women couldn’t be reached for comment:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=cDy0QrUzMLg
EDITOR’S NOTE: This piece has been amended since its original posting.