The Bachmanns' unfunny corn-dog joke

Yeehaw!  You go, Optimus!

With Texas governor Rick Perry coming on board as a GOP Presidential candidate, Michele Bachmann's campaign will probably fade.  Perry's a gun-totin', macho man from Texas (just like his predecessor, George W. Bush), so conservative evangelicals will probably fall behind him.  For now, though, Bachmann still holds the Dominionist banner.  However quickly Perry's campaign overtakes hers, those corn-dog pictures that have won such attention last week still hold a lesson for those of us who would like to keep her like out of power.

I've wondered why Michele hasn't more forcefully defended her husband Marcus against all the questions and jokes about his sexuality.  It's not that he doesn't deserve criticism regarding his counseling of gays.  Those "pray away the gay" tactics Marcus has used in his practice are offensive.

The Bachmanns, unlike fellow fundamentalist-Christian favorites Perry, Bush and Sarah Palin, are hard-core Dominionists.  I don't think Bush has even wondered whether he is one, but he did appeal to them.  Palin is one, but she's more like the lead choir singer at Sunday services than an actual church official.  Perry isn't one, yet, although he has quite consciously moved into their corner.  Unlike any of them, the Bachmanns know what they are preaching.

Given that the Bachmanns's beliefs include "complementarian theology," which boils down to the notion that wives must submit their husbands, you'd think that Michele's candidacy contradicts itself.  How, after all, can a woman rule a nation is she is subservient to her husband?  Shouldn't Marcus be the one running for the White House?  What's wrong with him, anyway?  At face value, it's Michele's Dominionist supporters who should be going at her in weapons-free mode.

Michele can answer that:  wifely submission serves the larger goal submitting to God.  I would imagine that some of her supporters also think that Marcus's counseling would be much better served with Michele running the Oval Office.  Not all Dominionists buy those arguments; some would still feel obligated to attack the Bachmanns.  But even then, why bother, when their common enemies are doing all the hard work for them?  This way, Dominionists (and the rest of the Fox News set) can yet again pretend the victims of the godless pinko Muslim pagan Communist socialist heathen mutants who supposedly dominate the mainstream media.

Enter these photos of the foot-long corn dog:

A starburst in every bite.  Oh, wait:  this isn't Caribou Barbie, is it?

You know what they tell me?  The Bachmanns have decided to stop fighting all the questions about Marcus's sexuality.  If they really cared about quelling the rumors once and for all, they would have just stayed away from the corn-dog lines in Ames.  They've seen all the phallic jokes, and now they're just playing along.

Sometimes a corn dog is just a corn dog.  And sometimes it's a big, fat middle finger to the world.

---

Friday Double: The smell of her own ego

I've avoided discussing former half-term governors on this blog, simply because some of them get far more attention than they deserve.  I can understand why Illinois governor emeritus Rod Blagojevich hogs media attention; he's fortunate to have convinced TV networks to help with his massive legal bills.

That brunette atop this post, however, is another matter.  She's not just a teabagger, she's an outright Dominionist, someone who would have the United States transform into the neo-Crusader theocracy depicted in Julian Comstock.  It's only a remark she made in her attempt to hijack Rolling Thunder this weekend that prompted me to even mention her (or Blago):

I love that smell of the emissions.

Yes, I also loved the smell of those emissions, when they came from my grandfather's well appointed Glastron boat... forty years ago.  It was like sniffing glue.  By the time I turned seven, I realized that gasoline fumes weren't the best thing to be breathing.  Evidently, lady, you never picked up on that.  There are way too many of those gas fumes floating around, pumping out way too much carbon; and, like too many on your side of the aisle, you don't care about that any more than Lt. Col. Kilgore worried about napalm in Apocalypse Now.

On the plus side, the whole episode reminded me of a couple of songs that pretty well capture the most recently failed Vice-Presidential candidate.  When I first saw this hilarious bit of preening from  narcissistic Gaston, the villain in Beauty and the Beast, I knew that the whole movie would be a winner, unlike most of Disney's animated output from the 1990s.



If that described Caribou Barbie so perfectly, I wouldn't have needed this much darker piece from Little Jackie to also describe her.  It's not something I usually let anywhere my playlists -- the music is annoying enough without the lyrics -- but it fits too well today to resist.  Enjoy.

---