Michele Bachmann Overdrive

Michele Bachmann is the latest semi-fertile poster girl from guns'n'ammo on the righty right in the US of late. Recently lauded by George F Will, famed chicken-armed conservative baseball fan and neo-con, Bachmann famously questioned whether Obama and his crew were 'anti-american' during the 2008 election, and when an interviewer asked if is she'd support inquiries into their 'views', she thought it a great idea.

Lately she's become one of the many rusted on rigid right repubs that are shouting down anything the Dems put up on the grounds that if it's a Dem induced idea, ergo it's bad n'kay.

See her Dickipedia entry here.

When the Tea Party protests started up - and boy they didn't think that name through - naturally MB was front and centre. I'm surprised in fact she didn't turn up at the protests in a Davy Crockett coonskin cap with a tea bag tied to the tail, while sporting a flintlock. Despite receiving millions of dollars of free advertising on FOX, the tea party protests didn't amount to much more than a slight blip in bus ticket sales and a massive spike in packets of tea bags (the protesters encouraged to mail them to their congress person by means of indicating their disapproval at ... actually I'm not sure - let's say taxes).

With health-care reform being ludicrously protested against by the same hard nub of righties in the US, many of whom are still convinced Obama was grown in a Marxist test-tube in deepest darkest Africa, MB has too taken on this issue - calling on her com-padres to come to the Capitol and show those elected officials that we don't need no stinkin' government funded health-care.

Check out Dana Milbank's report on the protest for the Wash Post here.

Milbank dryly notes examples of home-made signage, which accuses the Obama white house of pretty much anything and everything (A few steps farther was the guy holding a sign announcing "Obama takes his orders from the Rothchilds" [sic], accusing Obama of being part of a Jewish plot to introduce the antichrist), and hilariously points out that the protest was not in fact a protest - at least officially.

Technically, Thursday's GOP-sponsored rally at the Capitol was a "press conference" (a Capitol Police spokeswoman explained that the lawmakers didn't have a permit for a demonstration). The speakers took no questions at this news conference, instead calling, at least a dozen times, for the Pelosi bill's death.

Milbank ends his report as follows;

By the time it was over, medics had administered government-run health care to at least five people in the crowd who were stricken as they denounced government-run health care. But Bachmann overlooked this irony as she said farewell to her recruits.

"You," she said, "are the most beautiful sight any of us freedom fighters have seen for a long time."

Oh dear sweet baby Jesus. Also, the fact that the right in the US have adopted the idea they are 'freedom fighters' when the vast bulk of FF's have been socialist in nature for the last 150 odd years is simply wonderful.

Amazing. Protesters protesting for the right to have over-priced unrepresentative health-care.