I'll keep the prelude brief: the visual representation that evokes Dana Milbank to me is a little girl with a skinned knee wailing that his pain is the result of an unjust world. Now, of course, there is no justice for a dude being named Dana, but we all have our hurdles. Sack up, sir. Sack up.
Michele Bachmann's alternate universe
By Dana Milbank
Tuesday, January 25, 2011; 11:15 PM
The president was lofty.
Generally it’s not good to start a column with political wood. I’m telling you, he’s going to shoot his wad early and flounder for a couple paragraphs at the end there. Only you would sexualize a Dana Milbank column. Oh Jesus, you’re back again?
"We will move forward together, or not at all - for the challenges we face are bigger than party, and bigger than politics," he said in hisState of the Union address.
Is he seriously citing platitudes as though they have meaning?
The official Republican response, too, aimed high.
Admiral Ackbar says: “It’s a trap!” Dana Milbank doesn’t compliment conservatives except to insult other conservatives.
"Americans are skeptical of both political parties, and that skepticism is justified - especially when it comes to spending," said Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. "So hold all of us accountable."
And then there was Michele Bachmann.
Told ya so. It’s hardly an impressive feat to predict something you’ve already read. I needed to inflate my ego, alright. You really don’t get Freudian psychology. I AM your ego. I’ve been feeding you for so many years, it was bound to happen.
As the leader of the Tea Party Caucus in the House, the Minnesota Republican gave her own, unauthorized response to the State of the Union,
Jesus, you make it sound like the Never Say Never Again of the State of the Union responses. She was solicited to give the response by the Tea Party Express.
live from the National Press Club, filmed by Fox News, broadcast live on CNN and telecast by the Tea Party Express. It had all the altitude of a punch to the gut.
What an absolutely terrible metaphor. Let’s deconstruct this one. First, altitude is a strange objective for a political speech. Politicians with “altitude” usually come off as detached, a universally acknowledged negative attribute for politicians. Secondly, a punch in the gut says absolutely nothing about altitude. The idiomatic basis for this rhetorical turd lies only in the idea of a “low blow.” Every toddler who’s ever seen a fight knows that “low blows” refer to hits below the beltline. Unless you’re 83 and living in Boca Raton, a punch to the gut is considerably above the belt line.
I’ve mired myself in specificity. I was wondering how deep you’d dig into your own pontificating bullshit. The point is that by avoiding an easy metaphor—as an example, “it had the altitude of the bunny slopes”—Milbank has, in effect, rendered the idea of altitude meaningless. God you love to hear yourself speak. I’m writing, jackass.
"After the $700 billion bailout,
Fact.
the trillion-dollar stimulus,
Fact.
and the massive budget bill with over 9,000 earmarks,
Fact.
many of you implored Washington to please stop spending money we don't have,"
Universally acknowledged interpretation of the Tea Party’s rise.
Bachmann said. "But, instead of cutting, we saw an unprecedented explosion of government spending and debt,
Fact.
unlike anything we have seen in the history of our country."
Widely held conclusion of most of the right. None of this is extreme, belligerent, argumentative, or otherwise unseemly.
Armed with charts and photographs,
First Glenn Beck’s blackboard and now this…they’ve discovered PowerPoint! Are you mocking him there? Of course I’m mocking Dana Milbank. Well maybe you should be more clear to the reader(s) Doesn’t this little back and forth serve the purpose? Well yeah, if you want to rely on cheap little interludes like this. I’m good with it.
but not a word of fellowship,
Bachman’s address was 841 words due to time constraints. By contrast, Ryan used 1,669 and Obama’s address tallied 6803. When you have the constraints Bachman had, you tend to cut out the platitudes and get to the point. Even with half the content of Ryan and a little over a tenth of the content of President Obama, Bachman still managed to do the thing that Milbank criticized her for not doing:
“… but we still need all of us to pull together. We can do ths" –Michelle Bachman’s response to the State of the Union.
she railed against "a bureaucracy that tells us which light bulbs to buy, and which may put 16,500 IRS agents in charge of policing President Obama's health care bill."
Uh huh…
The State of the Nation was conciliatory Tuesday night, as each side made gestures to the other, and lawmakers for the first time crossed the aisle to sit - and applaud - together.
Yeah. It was super gay.
But Bachmann and her fellow Tea Partyers raged on.
Nope. Just Bachman.Also, you spelled ‘Partiers’ wrong.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, for one, was not pleased. "Paul Ryan is giving the official Republican response," he said when asked earlier about her dueling response. "Michele Bachmann, just as the other 534 members of the House and Senate, are going to have opinions as to the State of the Union."
Awwww snap. Gauntlet is down, bitches. You absolutely can’t pull that off, whitey.
For Republican leaders, it's more than a one-night problem. Bachmann is bidding to become the new voice of the opposition, replacing the titular leaders of the GOP.
My leg just got trapped underneath the giant grain of salt that comes with Dana Milbank expressing concern for the Republican leadership.
In the past week alone, Bachmann visited Iowa to test the waters for a presidential campaign and scored fifth in a field of 20 presidential candidates in a New Hampshire straw poll, besting such established figures as Mitch Daniels,
Who?
Newt Gingrich,
Is this 1998?
Mike Huckabee,
As we all said when Bill Clinton was in office, Arkansas isn’t a real state.
John Thune,
Neither is South Dakota. My God, you’re an elitist.
Haley Barbour
Nothing more than meh-worthy.
and Mike Pence.
::Swoon:: Butch up, Nancy. Real men don’t dance or swoon.
Returning to Washington, she hosted Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia at a gathering of her Tea Party Caucus, then went for an appearance on "The O'Reilly Factor" on Fox News and a keynote speech to the March for Life's annual dinner. And that was all before her Tea Party response to the State of the Union address.
Are these supposed to be character defaults or something?
Two dozen reporters chased her down a hall in the Capitol complex this week, seeking an explanation for the speech. "I never took this as a State of the Union response, necessarily," she said innocently. The title above the text of her speech her office released Tuesday night: "Bachmann's Response to State of the Union."
From the exact same interview: “I am not giving the official Republican response. This is not a competition. I’m very excited about Paul Ryan’s response, I think he’ll do a wonderful response. This was really a reaction that I was giving to people in the Tea Party.” The take-away is that she was parsing between response and reaction. The response is what Paul Ryan gave. A reaction is something that every news panelist over the next three days is going to give.
Party leaders, intimidated by the Tea Party activists,
The implication that Republicans are at war with the Tea Party is asinine. Certainly entrenched pols have something to lose from the shifting dynamic of the GOP, but anyone with a teaspoon of common sense understands that the Tea Party is nothing new; the people attending these rallies have always been the silent base of the Republican Party, supplanted in influence for only a few frenetic years in the early 2000s by the religious right.
have little control over Bachmann. They denied her the party leadership post she sought, but when it came to her plan to upstage the authorized GOP response Tuesday night, the most House Speaker John Boehner could do was grumble that it's "a little unusual."
My God! There’s blood in the streets from the GOP insurrection!
Bachmann is more than a little unusual. Her greatest hits are now legendary: Her suggestion that President Obama and the Democrats are "anti-American,"
She’s not the only one. That’s what happens when you bow to foreign leaders, attend church with a radically anti-American preacher, and cozy up to domestic terrorists.
her caution that the census could be used to create internment camps,
Her caution was that the census has been used to populate internment camps.
"Take this into consideration. If we look at American history, between 1942 and 1947, the data that was collected by the Census Bureau was handed over to the FBI and other organizations at the request of President Roosevelt, and that's how the Japanese were rounded up and put into the internment camps ... I'm not saying that that's what the Administration is planning to do, but I am saying that private personal information that was given to the Census Bureau in the 1940s was used against Americans to round them up, in a violation of their constitutional rights, and put the Japanese in internment camps."
The larger argument was one against the government amassing databases of unnecessary information.
her accusation that Obama is running a "gangster government"
He comes from Chicago and his Chief of Staff at the time was Rahm Emmanuel. If for no other reason than Rahm, that qualified the executive branch as gangsters.
and her request that people be "armed and dangerous" to fight climate-change legislation.
We listened to all this shit with the Giffords story. Don’t you have enough pie on your face? It wasn’t a call for violence in any conceivable way.
At a time colleagues have toned down their words, Bachmann went to Iowa and proclaimed: "If we want to kill Obamacare and we want to end socialized medicine, it must be done in the next election!"
Do you in any way disagree?
"It is my firm belief that America is under greater attack now . . . than at any time," she warned, voicing "grave doubt" about the nation's survival.
The Obama agenda has been ambitious in its deviation from politics as usual. Of course those that believe that the country was too liberal three years ago--and those constituents are legion—now believe that this is a dire time for the protection of the liberties that we hold dear. I would certainly quibble with her over the severity of some of our historical threats, but I certainly don’t disagree with her that vast swaths of American liberties are in jeopardy. If we lose them, then what’s the point of paying lip service to freedom?
She presented to the assembled Iowans a novel view of American history in which the "founders . . . worked tirelessly until slavery was no more." In Bachmann's version, "It didn't matter the color of their skin. . . . Once you got here, we were all the same."
Most of the founders did work to eliminate slavery from the United States. They determined that cohesion with the Southern states in the short-term—without which the Revolution would have been lost--was an asset that outweighed the moral blight of slavery. That work was not insignificant, nor was . The idea that Bachman, who evoked obscure historical tidbits like the Muskego Manifesto and quoted Lincoln, didn’t understand the basic historical chronology of the Emancipation Proclamation is an asinine game of gotcha. I could just as easily say that Barack Obama believed that there were 57 states. The arch of the speech—and it’s 1:30 in the morning so I listened to maybe two of fifty seven minutes—was the significance of American Exceptionalism. It’s a doctrine from which Milbank recoils in horror.
She was at it again Tuesday night. She ignored the bipartisan seating plan and placed herself between two other Tea Party House Republicans. Soon after, she was on air herself, reading out choice slogans: "failed stimulus . . . repeal Obamacare . . . government-run coverage . . . voted out the big-spending politicians."
So we disapprove of buzzwords now? Did you even listen to the State of the Union?
It was angry,
I, for one, am glad she didn’t try to blow sunshine up my ass.
and at times wrong, but Bachmann has gone far with that formula.
Backhanded compliments are far classier than rhetorical haymakers. I’ve had enough of Milbank’s prissy sermonizing about the crassness of Bachman’s earnest opposition. Good conservatives can not be afraid of being “gauche” in the eyes of Dana Milbank and his ilk. They’re children who can’t play games with established rules, so they make them up as they go along. This year the State of the Union is all about being conciliatory. But the next time the President or a prominent liberal gets feisty, you can be certain you’ll find Milbank in his corner.
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