Matt Taibbi takes on goofball far-right Minnesota Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann in the pages of the new Rolling Stone. It’s everything you want it to be, trust me:

Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and, as you consider the career and future presidential prospects of an incredible American phenomenon named Michele Bachmann, do one more thing. Don’t laugh.

It may be the hardest thing you ever do, for Michele Bachmann is almost certainly the funniest thing that has ever happened to American presidential politics. Fans of obscure 1970s television may remember a short-lived children’s show called Far Out Space Nuts, in which a pair of dimwitted NASA repairmen, one of whom is played by Bob (Gilligan) Denver, accidentally send themselves into space by pressing “launch” instead of “lunch” inside a capsule they were fixing at Cape Canaveral. This plot device roughly approximates the political and cultural mechanism that is sending Michele Bachmann hurtling in the direction of the Oval Office.

Bachmann is a religious zealot whose brain is a raging electrical storm of divine visions and paranoid delusions. She believes that the Chinese are plotting to replace the dollar bill, that light bulbs are killing our dogs and cats, and that God personally chose her to become both an IRS attorney who would spend years hounding taxpayers and a raging anti-tax Tea Party crusader against big government. She kicked off her unofficial presidential campaign in New Hampshire, by mistakenly declaring it the birthplace of the American Revolution. “It’s your state that fired the shot that was heard around the world!” she gushed. “You are the state of Lexington and Concord, you started the battle for liberty right here in your backyard.”

I said lunch, not launch! But don’t laugh. Don’t do it. And don’t look her in the eyes; don’t let her smile at you. Michele Bachmann, when she turns her head toward the cameras and brandishes her pearls and her ageless, unblemished neckline and her perfect suburban orthodontics in an attempt to reassure the unbeliever of her non-threateningness, is one of the scariest sights in the entire American cultural tableau. She’s trying to look like June Cleaver, but she actually looks like the T2 skeleton posing for a passport photo. You will want to laugh, but don’t, because the secret of Bachmann’s success is that every time you laugh at her, she gets stronger.

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 batshit crazy. Not medically crazy, not talking-to-herself-on-the-subway crazy, but grandiose crazy, late-stage Kim Jong-Il crazy — crazy in the sense that she’s living completely inside her own mind, frenetically pacing the hallways of a vast sand castle she’s built in there, unable to meaningfully communicate with the human beings on the other side of the moat, who are all presumed to be enemies.

Bachmann’s story, to hear her tell it, is about a suburban homemaker who is chosen by God to become a politician who will restore faith and family values to public life and do battle with secular humanism. But by the time you’ve finished reviewing her record of lies and embellishments and contradictions, you’ll have no idea if she actually believes in her own divine inspiration, or whether it’s a big con job. Or maybe both are true — in which case 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.

Michele Bachmann’s Holy War (Rolling Stone)

 
Once again, Matt Taibi shows why he is, beyond all doubt or argument to the contrary, the best writer in America today, as he describes, with surgical precision, his Tea-party “epiphany.” What more can I add to the perfect prose contained in the following six paragraphs?

It’s taken three trips to Kentucky, but I’m finally getting my Tea Party epiphany exactly where you’d expect: at a Sarah Palin rally. The red-hot mama of American exceptionalism has flown in to speak at something called the National Quartet Convention in Louisville, a gospel-music hoedown in a giant convention center filled with thousands of elderly white Southerners. Palin — who earlier this morning held a closed-door fundraiser for Rand Paul, the Tea Party champion running for the U.S. Senate — is railing against a GOP establishment that has just seen Tea Partiers oust entrenched Republican hacks in Delaware and New York. The dingbat revolution, it seems, is nigh.

“We’re shaking up the good ol’ boys,” Palin chortles, to the best applause her aging crowd can muster. She then issues an oft-repeated warning (her speeches are usually a tired succession of half-coherent one-liners dumped on ravenous audiences like chum to sharks) to Republican insiders who underestimated the power of the Tea Party Death Star. “Buck up,” she says, “or stay in the truck.”

Stay in what truck? I wonder. What the hell does that even mean?

Scanning the thousands of hopped-up faces in the crowd, I am immediately struck by two things. One is that there isn’t a single black person here. The other is the truly awesome quantity of medical hardware: Seemingly every third person in the place is sucking oxygen from a tank or propping their giant atrophied glutes on motorized wheelchair-scooters. As Palin launches into her Ronald Reagan impression — “Government’s not the solution! Government’s the problem!” — the person sitting next to me leans over and explains.

“The scooters are because of Medicare,” he whispers helpfully. “They have these commercials down here: ‘You won’t even have to pay for your scooter! Medicare will pay!’ Practically everyone in Kentucky has one.”

A hall full of elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing against government spending and imagining themselves revolutionaries as they cheer on the vice-presidential puppet hand-picked by the GOP establishment. If there exists a better snapshot of everything the Tea Party represents, I can’t imagine it.

Tea & Crackers: How corporate interests and Republican insiders built the Tea Party monster (Rolling Stone)

 
In case you missed it, America’s best political writer, Matt Taibbi weighed in on L’affair Breitbart on the Rolling Stone blog:

I’ve decided it isn’t even necessary to have the debate over whether or not the Tea Partiers are racists. It’s enough to point out that the Tea Party and its sympathizers contain too many people like Andrew Breitbart (the idiot blogger from the Big Government website who originally posted the Sherrod video), Bill O’Reilly, and Glenn Beck, all of whom popped huge public woodies the moment the Sherrod video surfaced.

It’s just not necessary to say whether or not these people are racists. All that needs to be pointed out is that when they get a chance to gape at a video purporting to show a black Obama official confessing to having mistreated a white farmer (it turned out to be the opposite of that, of course), or a tape of Black Panther King Shamir talking about “killing cracker babies,” the word that best describes the emotions they display at these times is glee.

They enjoy these morbid stories about offenses to white dignity way too much. I caught Glenn Beck talking about some case involving a Black Panther who was intimidating people at a voting booth back in 2008—the guy had this pervy smile on his face that made him look exactly like one of those creepy dudes sitting hunched over at the edge of the bed playing the cuckold in cheating-wife porn videos. Over the Black Panthers! Who the hell has even seen a Black Panther since the seventies? The whole thing reminds me of that Chris Rock routine about Native Americans—“When was the last time you saw two Indians?”

I love how he ends the piece by asking “Is anyone else dreading 2012?”

I feel ya, dude. It’s going to be an all out brawl. 2012 might be the year the American republic ends up so frayed as to be ungovernable. The rightwing has backed itself so far into a corner that there is almost no way that they can still walk it back anymore. People are going to die during the next national election cycle. 2008 was merely the opening act. It’s already fucking fucked up. The rhetoric is so mean and hateful that the next step is easy to predict: Violence. 

Looked at from one point of view, the whole Axis of Idiocy (Fox News, tea baggers, conservative Christians) thing we’re seeing in this country is nothing short of a mass mobilization of some of the meanest and stupidest people to publicly present themselves that I have witnessed in my entire life. Don’t get me wrong, I consider most of these sad, deluded fools to be people whose time will somewhat quickly come to an end. The Tea party is a manifestation, by and large, of cranky old white people. They’ll be dying soon enough and their grandchildren will not be replenishing their ranks. It’s just not going to work that way. the demographics all but prohibit it from happening. Still, even if, historically speaking, it’ll be temporary, what happens in the meantime is going to make for a really trying couple of decades, ‘cause there is a mean genie that’s gotten out of the bottle and he ain’t going back in anytime soon.

The Tea Party is Perverted and Irrelevant (Rolling Stone)

 
I’m someone who, like many of you, I am sure, had high hopes for the Obama presidency. After two terms of Bush, it really felt like the country was turning the page. Inauguration Day felt like a wonderful exhalation of 8 years of just… pollution. I thought Obama would be the second coming of FDR, I really did, but almost a year later, has anything truly changed? Has anything gotten better for the common man? We all know that the Wall Street oligarchs are sitting prettier than ever, what about the rest of us?

Today’s Huffington Post had a nice bit of reporting from Ryan Grim about Ben Bernanke’s remarks to the Senate Banking Comittee today and as I read it, I was absolutely enraged. This asshole has got to go. If Obama is getting his advice from guys like Ben Bernanke (and Geithner and Rubin) we are fucking doomed!

Let this sink in:

Ben Bernanke has overseen the greatest expansion of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet in its history, pouring trillions of dollars into Wall Street firms at roughly zero interest rates.

His generosity, however, has a limit.

In testimony before the Senate Banking Committee today, where he’s seeking re-appointment as the Fed’s chairman, Bernanke called for cutbacks in Medicare and Social Security even as unemployment rises and the middle class is endangered.

Citing legendary bank robber Willie Sutton, Bernanke said of the retirement and health care funds that are the legacy of the New Deal: “That’s where the money is.”

Sen. Bob Bennett (R-Utah) sympathized with Bernanke, saying that, because of entitlement spending, “you’re going to be looking at a situation where the Congress will be unable to provide any kind of fiscal discipline because of the mandatory spending. That puts an enormous burden on your plate.”

“Well, Senator, I was about to address entitlements,” Bernanke replied. “I think you can’t tackle the problem in the medium term without doing something about getting entitlements under control and reducing the costs, particularly of health care.”

Bernanke reminded Congress that it has the power to repeal Social Security and Medicare.

“It’s only mandatory until Congress says it’s not mandatory. And we have no option but to address those costs at some point or else we will have an unsustainable situation,” said Bernanke.

But here are several other obvious options that could make the situation sustainable—including a transaction tax on Wall Street speculation or a slight tax hike on the wealthiest Americans.

Bernanke talks as if increasing taxes on the wealthy simply isn’t an option.

Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) followed Bennett and pointed out that “there’s only really two ways you can deflect this deficit, and that’s either by cutting expenditures or raising income taxes or other forms of taxes.”

Reed asked him if he could think of other ways, but Bernanke returned to entitlement money as the way to balance the budget.

“Willie Sutton robbed banks because that’s where the money is, as he put it,” Bernanke said. “The money in this case is in entitlements.”

When I read this I wanted to throw up. Apparently Sen. Bernie Sanders, one of the last honest men in government felt the same:

Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont who has placed a hold on Bernanke’s nomination, was apoplectic when HuffPost told him Bernanke was pushing for cuts in entitlement spending. “Bernanke wants to cut entitlement spending? Well, that confirms everything I’m saying,” Sanders fumed.

“The CEOs and top people on Wall Street make huge bonuses, and what? We’re going to cut back on Social Security and Medicare? That’s what we’re going to do?”

I think Sen. Sanders has the right idea, don’t you? Here’s what Progressive change said of Sanders (I wholeheartedly agree!)

Now, Bernie Sanders has taken the brave step of putting a “hold” on renominating Bush’s choice for another 4-year term at the helm of our economy.This is huge. Wall Street will not be happy, and they’ll go after Sanders with everything they’ve got. Most senators wouldn’t even consider going up against them like this. That’s why Bernie Sanders is a real progressive hero.

If you want to donate money to Bernie Sanders, click here.

And finally, here’s an information rich clip of Rolling Stone’s ace political editor Matt Taibbi’s take on Obama’s economic team. It’s a preview of Taibbi’s upcoming expose for the magazine titled “Obama’s Big Sellout”:

“[Bob] Rubin probably more than any other person was responsible for the financial crisis by deregulating the economy [while] in the White House. And he had a major role in helping destroy one of the world’s biggest company in Citigroup. He has one of the worst tack records you can find, but he was basically the guy who was the architect of the entire Obama policy. Obama put him in charge of everything. “

These guys are idiots. Hell, they’re practically traitorous! They’re traitorous idiots. They should be fired with extreme prejudice. And then tar and feathered.

You think I’m joking?

 
As readers of this blog know, I’m a big fan of Matt Taibbi. No one, save for Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert, comes close to his ability to hone in on the very essence of a political issue and then lacerate the guilty parties with the flick knife of his prose. What an amazing writer. It’s all A game with Taibbi, but he’s especially on point when he writes about Sarah Palin. Sample some of the goods from his most recent column at True/Slant:

Sarah Palin is the Empress-Queen of the screaming-for-screaming?