Michelle Bachmann: Proving That Republican Racial Understanding Basically Equals That of Professional Wrestling

Poor Michelle Bachmann. She's not like us. In our post-modern hugger mugger of sending tweets to bisexual lovers we met on Facebook, we lack the perspective to understand a decent Minnesotan hockey mom who just wants to bring back McCarthyite witch-hunts to cull the un-Americans from our national herd and to send strangers Christmas form letters where she talks about her pre-teen daughter's 14" hips and her desire for another daughter to never leave the home and spend her life in her parents' servitude.

I know what you're going to say: "Couldn't you have just tweeted this at me?" And you know what my response will be: stop being such a bitch about this, Julian. In any event, Michelle Bachmann is relevant because initially she wasn't even going to be the most insane thing about this weekend's CPAC (or Conservative Political Action Conference), the annual assplug- and dildo-filled logistics meeting for how the republican party is going to continue gangbanging America for another year without it getting all wet and sticky and gross again—like that Katrina thing.

No, initially that honor belonged to recently elected Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele: the steaming-cup-of-hot-carob response to the election of Barack Obama. Steele's entire strategy for the republican party's regaining America's trust relied on two prongs of attack:

1. "Tonight, we tell America: we know the past, we know we did wrong. My bad."
2. "I am here tonight to reject the idea that defeats of the past are a repudiation of core conservative values and principles. Nor do I believe that those defeats are a sign of things to come."

Or, in shorter terms: "I know we have dug America into a pretty deep hole. But give us more shovels and together, I believe digging downward will bring us back to the surface in China, where the people who own all our money live."

It was such a bravura performance that surely nothing could top it. Then Michelle Bachmann came out, yelling, repeatedly, "YOU BE DA MAN! YOU BE DA MAN!"


It was totally amazing.

Right then, I realized something: most republicans' understanding of other races of people pretty much stops somewhere at the level of a professional wrestler's. The physical and vocal stereotypes to which they appeal aren't even the soft bigotry of collegiate and professional pigeon-holing and "ironic" disparagement: they're the product of junior-high-school minds, reductive, luxuriantly non-complex minds. 

Take conservative political theater and conservative tendencies to frame minorities as either fearsome strong men or "defectors allied to us," add entrance music and occasional violence at the podium, and it's indistinguishable from Vince McMahon's WWE product. Iranians are bad people: they all wear keffiyehs and have big mustaches and try to put our soldiers in the camel clutch. Russians?—treacherous, vodka-swilling gymnasts, eager to wrap a quilt of jointly woven brotherhood around the iron bar of communism and punch a blonde Texan in the face with it. 

And black people?—basically just rappers who took a day job somewhere else until they could finally get signed by Thug Life Records, which is a black record company for black people, who are thug life (black). I know it sounds like an exaggeration, but try to think of what Michelle Bachmann would have said if the new RNC Chairman was hispanic. You're all thinking the same thing, aren't you?

MI PAPI, ESE VATO ODELAY!!!! I AM YOUR MAMACITA!!!VIVA LA RAZA, VIVA TAX CUTS!!!
The only thing that could make it tolerable is if John McCain wheeled in a giant cake for the new chairman, who leaned forward to blow out the candles just as Joe Biden erupted from inside the cake, punched him in the face with a model Amtrak train, then ran off — leaving McCain to tear off his shirt and reveal... my GOD, that's an OBAMA HOPE t-shirt!!!