In politics, it’s often difficult to know whether someone is crazy or just behaving in a crazy way for career and financial reward. Are they crazy or are they deliberately saying crazy things as a means of pandering to crazy voters. There’s a continuum for evaluating this dynamic, with “crazy” on one end of the spectrum and “crazy… like a fox” on the other end, and when it comes to Michele Bachmann, she’s totally crazy.
On his show last night, Chris Hayes defended Bachmann, and suggested that anyone who calls her crazy, especially the laundry list of blogs that posted lists of her craziest blurtgasms, is simply being dismissive.
Hayes said to panelists Joan Walsh and Dan Savage, “People call Michele Bachmann crazy a lot, people on our side, broadly, and it always drives me crazy a little bit because I just feel like that word has this kind of dismissive venom to it that doesn’t grapple seriously with someone who just has a set of beliefs.”
I’m not sure if Hayes was simply being classy and above-the-fray, or whether he was just being naive about the utter gibberish that’s belched out of Bachmann’s yapper on a regular basis, but needless to say I think he’s missing the point of what it means to call someone like Bachmann “crazy.” [continue reading here]