Nothing is off limits when the left attacks conservatives.
As soon as Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) announced that she would not be seeking a new term, it was time to brace for a barrage of vile, lying bile from the left-leaning media.
We didn’t have to wait long.
Newsweek / Daily Beast Special Correspondent Michael Tomasky quickly posted a piece called “Michele Bachmann, Daddy, Jesus, America” that allows him make up things about Rep. Bachmann but also to go after Jesus and America, too. Tomasky is an avowed liberal, and his attack piece is revealing in its nastiness and self-serving guesswork:
To me, the most important thing about what Bachmann represents is the profoundly undemocratic impulse of adopting a world view that took her own personal life experience and attempted to impose its lesson on the rest of us.
He goes on to explain that his suspicions about Bachmann were confirmed by a New Yorker slam in 2011. Tomasky sums up his takeaway:
When she was 14, Bachmann’s father, whom she’d adored, left her family. They became impoverished. It probably didn’t help that dad was a liberal. Two years later, she joined a prayer group, and she found a man to take daddy’s place.
The term “misogynist” gets kicked around by liberals as much as a hacky sack outside a Phish concert, but Tomasky’s last clause–and she found a man to take daddy’s place–is a darned strange way to talk about a person. It indicates the same deep-seated of disrespect for woman that’s been on display from Bill Clinton to John Edwards to Anthony Weiner.
Can you think of another politician–a man, perhaps–who was abandoned by his father, had his world view changed by this personal experience, and then took it a step further and actually wrote a book about it called Dreams from my Father?
Of course, President Obama isn’t a conservative, and so his motivations aren’t picked apart by the hypocritical and sneering Tomasky.
The “man” Tomasky says Bachmann found is Jesus, and so Tomasky is able to get in his first not-so-subtle hit on God and religion. With his double-standard smear laid out, Tomasky goes on to muse about Bachmann’s motive for getting into politics:
When you’ve had an experience like that, an experience that persuasive, you quite naturally proceed through life on the assumption that everyone needs such an experience, and that if only they will open themselves to such an experience, their lives will change, too. So I think it’s probably fair to conclude in her case that she wasn’t in politics to build senior centers or alter Medicare. She was in politics to give people fathers in Jesus, to give them her experience.
No reason for Tomasky to guess, though. As she told National Public Radio in 2011, Bachmann entered politics after winning a battle with state authorities over education policy. And Rep. Bachmann herself explained her motivation in running for office in her announcement video today:
My decision to seek federal office, both in my initial running for the House and my decision to run for the presidency of the United States, was based solely on my heartfelt concern for our country’s future.
Concern for her country was her motivation, not the Christian conversion crusade that Tomasky created out of whole cloth. Bachmann’s politics are rooted in her spiritual beliefs–but likely many believers, so is everything in her life.
Yet Tomasky’s real target isn’t just Bachmann; he’s taking aim at God, as well. This comes out in his lame attempt to create an illusion of balance he says:
One finds zealous types like this on the left too, of course, but since they don’t wrap themselves in the Shroud of Turin, they don’t usually come across as quite so demagogic, or at least not demagogic in quite as threatening a way, since their words don’t ring with all that bleak history of God and state that has produced so much misery and hatred over the centuries.
Naturally, he ignores the mass graves around the world filled with the bodies of men, women and children who had the misfortune to live in a time and place when demagogues of the left ruled.
Tomasky sees a woman who loves God and country and finds it bleak and threatening and undemocratic. It’s her patriotism and piety that chaps Tomasky’s hide. It bespeaks of the deep nihilism that Andrew Breitbart repeatedly pointed out was at the heart of liberalism.
Bachmann herself knew the hits would be coming when she announced she wasn’t going to running for the House again. As she said in her video, “I fully expect the mainstream liberal media to put a detrimental spin on my decision not to seek a fifth term”, adding: “They always seem to attempt to find a dishonest way to disparage me. “
And so, they did.
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