I caught this article in The Nation by Sarah Posner through email. (The phone tells me that The Nation still doesn’t know how to differentiate small from big screen). It seems to me that the analysis here is a in part a waste of time. We talk in studies of reasoned debate that rational audiences are the preferred target. But to take this item from Michelle Bachman as rational is, to me, beyond belief.

At a town hall meeting held in the parking lot of a sports bar in the Des Moines suburb of Indianola on Friday, Michele Bachmann asked a small circle of supporters and onlookers, “Why is it that government always wins? Why is it the taxpayer always loses?” Comparing the fiscal condition of the federal government to a family in bankruptcy, and blaming that on “government theft,” Bachmann positioned herself as a warrior against a rapacious behemoth. “Why should we bankrupt ourselves, why should we bankrupt our kids…to keep this thing going?” she asked. “It is a money-eating machine in Washington, DC, and I say it’s time to dismantle the machine.”

Here, Bachman uses a whole bunch of mixed metaphors and incoherent comparisons. The government is a family that steals from itself. This family is a “behemoth” and a “money-eating” “machine.” This language makes absolutely no sense and represents the kind of language that should be ignored by any thinking person.

It’s been my view for many years that the Republican Party is basically dead, which is a shame, and that the word “conservative” has been appropriated as a term simply meant to counterpoint “liberal.” This is why I refer to people like Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist as “so-called” conservatives. This article in The American Conservative by David Livingston represents a sort of push back but ultimately gives up on defining what conservatism might mean by ending with Reagan, another so-called conservative and certainly not a Republican and reduces Hume to a caricature.

And “gold standard, out of control spending” Rick Perry, a George W lookalike, is no more relevant.

A political part should have coherent representatives. There are none for the Republican Party.

Amazing.