For a woman who won the Ames Straw Vote on a platform as a "constitutional conservative," Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann seems pretty confused about just what the Constitution contains. For the second time in as many months, handlers for the Minnesota Congresswoman have been accused of roughing up reporters on the campaign trail. Maybe it's time she change that tagline to "everything but the First Amendment conservative"? She certainly doesn't seem like she's much of a fan of the freedom of the press.
Last month it was ABC News veteran Brian Ross who was treated to a mafia-style brusing. This week it's Don Lemon, a CNN vet who says he was actually shoved into a golf cart by Bachmann's pray-the-gay away husband Dr. Marcus Bachmann. This was after some of the Congresswoman's bodyguards had elbowed him roughly, Lemon says, and he'd asked them not to.
The Ross manhandling at least made some semblance of sense: he'd dug into Marcus Bachmann's controversial gay conversion clinics and aired the family's dirty laundry on national TV. Should anyone have lashed out? Of course not, but you can see where the Bachmann camp would have been a little trigger happy.
But Lemon says he was sticking to tame topics relating to the vote in Ames. Specifically, he asked her how she'd thought she'd fare -- both in the poll and during the debates. Bachmann should have been happy to answer, or at least indifferent.
It's already clear Bachmann has a problem with several of the existing portions of our government. She's vowed to have the doors locked on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and she's gunning for the health care act (or as she calls it, Obamacare). But if she wants to be president, Bachmann is going to have to learn that the commander in chief exists within a system of checks and balances. There's no re-writing the Constitution ... even if she doesn't like those pesky reporters.
Image via david_shankbone/Flickr
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Comments 4
No it won't.
Nobody cares
Lemon needs to get out of the way next time like other reporters on the campaign trail.
He needs to keep displaying those lovely dimples.
Cutie pie he is!
Bullshit. We haven't been presented with any footage of these so-called episodes of "roughing up reporters". So, given the fact that cameras are constantly rolling, this, and the Ross incident didn't happen. End of story. If it did, there would be film, that would be looped endlessly and played on every damn media outlet, 24/7, til the end of days. And if *anyone* believed the Ross incident was true and it was just unfortunate that nobody got film, there's not a snowball's chance in hell that a subsequent reporter would approach the camp without cameras rolling. Major, smelly, steamy bullshit.
Since obviously everyone should respect everyone, if Bachmann's statement is correct, then the verse in the Bible about woman submitting to their husbands says nothing at all about what women should do. So she is saying that verse in Bible is meaningless. But of course she really believes it says they should submit -- hence her comment about yielding to his wishes about law school, even though she didn't want to go. The upshot? We saw a point where Bachmann had to choose between publicly affirming her religious beliefs and saying what she figured was necessary politically -- and I guess we all know what she did.