I suppose nothing quite sums up the Tea Party better than Michelle Bachmann, delivering the TP SOTU response, looking at the wrong camera for her entire delivery:
Apparently, wingnuts no longer care about teleprompters, either.
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BudP
I nearly fell out of the safety hammock laughing
jayjaybear
The thing that should be most remembered about the current crop of tea-partying Republicans is that no SNL parody of any of them can really work as satire, as they are already well past the event horizon of a Poe Singularity, from which no rational evaluation can possibly tell parody from reality.
BGinCHI
Obviously she did this so that she wouldn’t burn out our brains with a direct look from her Rays of Truthiness.
soonergrunt
@jayjaybear:
You beat me to it. Michele Bachmann is a walking, talking (but not at the same time, natch) example of Poe’s Law.
shortstop
I don’t think it was a two-camera job. I think the brilliant ‘bagging folk who set this up (Patriot Productions Inc. or some similar crap) put the prompter way too far from the single camera and nobody on site was competent enough to catch it.
Loneoak
The Tea Party: looking so far to the right, they can’t see what is in front of them.
mac
I thought she was talking to god.
General Stuck
You had to post this and make me watch it. Yadda yadda yadda, Obama wants to eat all your white free market babies, and then send you a bill for it. And Bachmann is not looking at the wrong camera, the wrong camera is looking at Bachmann. This is always true for republicans.
Elisabeth
I just watched about fifteen seconds and got creeped out thinking someone was behind me.
(Btw, I read she chose not to wear the ribbon in honor of the Tucson shooting victims; I’d be curious to know why.)
johnsmith1882
@Loneoak: Sounds like we have a winner in the bumper sticker contest. I could only get about fifteen seconds into the video, with the sound off, before turning it off. Yuck. I can’t wait for her to start up McCarthy hearings part deux.
bkny
ya know … i wouldn’t be surprised if this was some dirty trick i.e., kkkarl rove and friends…
El Cid
A former Republican spokesman on Rachel Maddow said that the main camera was the one for the Tea Party website she was giving the speech for, and the broadcast channels fit in beside.
eemom
Nope. Not even the hilarity of her looking at the wrong camera will induce me to watch/listen to that creature. Nice try tho.
Flugelhorn
Typical John. I know you are not a journalist. Far from it in fact, but do you not slam, on a regular basis, people who do not fact check?
Not a Bachmann fan, but I do know how to investigate things and not jump to conclusions that fit the narrative in my head unlike Keith Olbermann and yourself. There were two cameras, numb-nutz. The one she was looking at was for the Web-feed intended for the Tea-Party. The one she was NOT looking at was the CNN feed. If you had watched it on the web, it would be perfectly fine. The Tea-party sponsored her Web-cast so naturally she chose to look at the sponsors’ camera, and not the CNN camera.
Nice fact check.
Southern Beale
OT but John & everyone else: if you haven’t read Ed’s “The Canard” post over at Gin And Tacos today you really should. It’s an excellent summation of where we are now and why empty rhetoric about “competitiveness” won’t fix it.
cleek
Bachmann tries so hard to matter. it’s cute.
gwangung
@El Cid: …which unintentionally encapsulates the Tea Baggers approach to policy, politics and life.
Cris
Reminds me of Stuart Pankin as Bob Charles trying to find the current camera.
ant
nice eye makeup
Violet
Her use of the chart was practically Perot-ian.
sukabi
well, I can’t watch more than a minute of it… she’s one of those people that gives my gag reflex quite a workout… on the other hand, her makeup looks like it was done by the same blind drag queen that was responsible for Tammy Faye Baker’s “look”, or maybe it has something to do with being “blinded by the light” …. I don’t know, the effect’s the same, so whatever.
The setup to her reBUTTTal is interesting, I’ve never seen a sitting politician give a speech in front of a huge picture of themselves before…
Dave
@Flugelhorn: That’s no excuse. She knows she has multiple cameras in front of her. The fact she can’t figure out how to compensate is just further evidence of her idiocy. That and her bizarre callout to Iwo Jima, which proves she has no grasp of history whatsoever.
cleek
@Flugelhorn:
that’s awesome.
nobody bothered to say “Hey Michelle, this camera over here is on, too. It’s CNN’s. It’s what most people will see. You might want to look at it from time to time” ?
that’s a real top-notch production team she’s got working for her!
KXB
Hmmm… and to think, I chose to watch “In Treatment” Season 2 instead. At least on the show, people with serious emotional issues talk them out with a professional, they don’t hold office in the U.S. Congress.
Loneoak
@Flugelhorn:
If she isn’t looking into a camera in front of her, she is looking at the wrong camera. Period. It means that they are so amateur that they can’t get a single feed or can’t set one camera on top of the other. The whole production was one big pile of FAIL, much like your trolling.
El Cid
@gwangung: To be fair, it was originally only going to be a Bachmann address for them. Which was polite enough to spare the rest of it.
But the Tea Party entangled CNN wanted to get this sage spokesman on the air, so their cameras came in next.
Legalize
@shortstop:
Yep.
General Stuck
@sukabi:
You know who else gave speeches in front of huge pictures of themselves?
El Cid
@Loneoak: I don’t know whether or not it was easy to set up a live dual feed between the CNN cameras and the webcast, and I’m assuming the webcam wouldn’t have anywhere near the resolution or other quality for a CNN broadcast.
c u n d gulag
Michele Bachmann, giving her Teabaggers SFTO – State, From the “O”nion – because that’s who it seems as if wrote her speech.
While I watched Obama and Ryan, I listened to her on the radio last night.
She sounded like a well meaning, enthusiastic, but not at all bright 7th grader whose turn it is to do an oral report, and wants to impress the handsome and conservative US History and Government teacher who she’s got a crush on, and has filled her notebook with hearts with his name and hers, instead of actually paying attention, and is up there with a few words written on both hands and her jeans, hoping, like, that he, like, smiles at her at the end, because, like, he’s sooooooo dreamy when he smiles, gives her an “A+++++,” and will sweep her off her feet, and, like, talk about waiting to have sex until they’re married, like, because he respects her and the promise she’s made to her Dad, like who’s now no longer the love of her life because, like, he is… Sigh…
Here comes her grade:
“What, a ‘D!’ I thought you LIKED me? I hate you! I hate you!! I HATE YOU!!!”
Michele Bachmann: our ‘go-to’gal coming off the bench for when it’s fourth down and goal at the 1 yard line, time’s running out, and the regular’s haven’t given the kind of crazy that gets your team that touchdown.
What a dope, what a maroon.
And when I looked at the video this morning, I wondered, who taught her to use eye make-up?
A raccoon?
She looked like a nut.
Well, at least this time the camera didn’t lie…
gwangung
@El Cid: To be fair, if you get the opportunity to get national coverage, you ought to, you know, take advantage of it and pitch to the rest of us plebes, too. That is, if you want the rest of the country to follow you…
I know, I know. Radical thought…..
shortstop
@El Cid: Ah, so that’s it.
@Flugelhorn: Cole said there were two cameras. He also said she was looking into the wrong one. Both correct.
Unless it’s your laughable assertion that there she just HAD to pick one and that were more superannuated, modernity-ignorant teabaggers (sorry for the redundancies) watching this via a webcast than there were people viewing it on CNN…and that Bachmann and her people thus made the right camera decision? Really?
fanshawe
Obviously the CNN camera was a liberal plant.
Violet
I particularly liked the bizarre pink or peach colored chair in front of the American flag. It made the whole setting look like it was grandma’s living room. All it lacked was a nice needlepoint pillow.
Southern Beale
@General Stuck:
Noooo….. not …… HITLER?!
(Cue “Psycho” strings …)
sukabi
@Southern Beale: the other problem, is that business doesn’t have any incentives to actually do R&D or production here in this country… there is no “down side” to taking everything overseas… the one thing that’s helped spur innovation in the past is government funding of R & D projects, and that seems to be off the table completely.
j low
@Flugelhorn: The stupidity of that particular bit of outrage is stupendous. BTW- numb-nutz? Really?
Ash Can
@Flugelhorn: So how does this particular fact — which we all knew already, by the way — change the fact that Bachmann and her Tea Party cohort came off looking not ready for prime time? How much production savvy does it take to figure out that if you’re shown to be looking off to the side in your speech — to a not-insignificant CNN audience — it makes you and your outfit look bad? The Tea Party sponsor especially should have figured this out — and they especially should have done this since, if you had checked your own facts, this was actually a Fox camera that Bachmann wasn’t looking into, not a CNN one.
Southern Beale
OK I’m watching this with the sound off. It appears that one of her eyes is looking at the camera and one of her eyes is looking off in the distance somewhere.
Just trying to be fair here …
Elisabeth
@cleek:
According to the NYT it was the pool feed (which happened to be Fox News) camera. You’d think she’d spend a minute looking at a camera from her propaganda arm.
Matt
Even if there were two cameras, surely someone should have realized how ridiculous it would look for tv viewers to watch her looking somewhere way off camera the entire speech. John’s right, this stupid production error just about sums up the Tea Party.
Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther
@Loneoak: You win. I’m not sure why John even left the thread open after comment #6, because you have already won it. Indeed, I believe I will send your superlative contribution out to the world via Tweet. You see if I don’t!
/ellaesther. Saving democracy one tweet at a time.
Comrade Dread
Yikes.
Is it just me, or does anyone else get the vibe from that video that she just unsheathed a mouthful of pointy teeth and devoured a small live rodent before they started broadcasting?
I can only assume by the fact that she got elected as proof that you voters back there have made a deal with the lizard people to deliver the rest of us as food in exchange for your own lives.
Southern Beale
@sukabi:
Actually, POTUS mentioned that in his speech last night but with the Teanut-GOPers focused solely on deficits I wonder if even the smallest R&D funding would make it through.
I can only hope that the Dems win huge in 2012 and send these assholes packing.
magurakurin
@Flugelhorn:
so, how come when EVERYONE ELSE IN THE WORLD gives a speech to multiple feeds this doesn’t happen? Either the Teabagger technicians are fucking stupid, untrained or underfunded. Any way you look at they are out of their depth.
Scott
Why should she address the CNN camera? She’s not trying to talk to the rest of the country. She’s only preaching to the choir.
Poopyman
@Southern Beale:
No! Of course not! He was referring to Stephen Colbert.
shortstop
@c u n d gulag: I don’t think that’s going to get the same reception over here that it got from MsJoanne. Whole different ballgame.
magurakurin
@ant:
I notice that, too. “she got a whole ‘queen of the Undead’ thing goin on there…”
eemom
not only is this not worth watching even for comedic value, but it seems to be causing the site to load even SLOWER than usual. Jussayinzall.
shortstop
I was actually afraid that she might tamp down the palpable crazy long enough to get through a simple speech. I underestimated both the depth of her disease and the thorough ineptitude of her handlers.
Loneoak
@Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther:
Aw, thanks. My twitter handle is trnpkrt, but I hardly use it.
sukabi
@Southern Beale: with the current batch of
sociopathsdeficit squawks in congress the chances for funding anything significant is slim to none… sorry for the negativity, but I don’t see anything changing for the better in the near future… most of the ideas coming out of DC are so far detached from reality they are laughable.JCT
Amateur hour all the way on that broadcast. One of my favorite Wonkette comments from last night “Bachmann is delivering this to Satan, who’s standing right off camera, giving her a thumbs-up.”
@ Loneoak — bumpersticker of that one, please.
To top it all off, great quote from Weiner this AM “”I felt like I just needed a drink when I was done with Paul Ryan,” he said, adding: “And then Michele Bachmann who is clearly not in touch with the mothership.”
Such fine examples of the star “power” of the opposition.
Woodrow "asim" Jarvis Hill
@Flugelhorn:
Which of course explains why, when you go to the Tea Party Express website, they use a video feed not from this supposed camera going directly to them, but one that’s from…get this…the PBS NewsHour YouTube account — one with her looking into the “wrong” camera.
Amateur hour.
Donald
I can NOT believe that this didn’t get the “Hoot-Smalley” tag as well.
Sentient Puddle
I’m not sure I want to even try to watch the video, but if the excuse is that there were two cameras and that she was speaking into the second camera, why does the screencap of the video above show her postured toward the first camera? I don’t think this is how normal people would split the difference.
morzer
Poor mad lass. She’s just not used to being in front of a webcam with her clothes on.
Southern Beale
@sukabi:
Right, and as I wrote over the weekend (not quite the same as funding R&D but it’s similar) … entrepreneurship is thriving in countries like Norway. Because it seems when you don’t have to worry about paying exorbitant healthcare bills and putting food on the table it frees you up to be creative. I can’t help but think R&D goes the same way.
c u n d gulag
href=”#comment-2395362″>shortstop:
I normally don’t crosspost my comments.
I thought someone might like it.
Oh well…
Steeplejack
@El Cid:
This. I heard that too.
Southern Beale
My comment was embargoed for using the deadly S word. Dammit.
Loneoak
If Anne Laurie is reading this, I would be happy to have a bumper sticker in the BJ store.
dmsilev
Be fair to the Tea Party Express. Based on the historical knowledge that they demonstrated yesterday, we should all be grateful that her address wasn’t done in hand-tinted daguerreotypes which were Pony-Expressed to local media outlets for subsequent broadcast across those new-fangled telegraph thingies.
dms
Villago Delenda Est
@Flugelhorn:
Which means she was busy preaching to the choir, not trying to persuade anyone who isn’t already in her camp.
Probably to get them to send her money. She’s learned that much from the Wasilla grifter.
Joey Maloney
@El Cid:
Your suggestion puts me in mind of what I think is a TBogg quote, though I can’t find it at the moment: “Any sentence that begins ‘in fairness to Bill Kristol’ must propose a sound beating in order to be at all credible.”
Linda Featheringill
@Southern Beale:
The Prez is trying to look forward while the Repubs are definitely looking backwards. The goals he talked about are a bit ambitious but they really are needed if we are to prosper in the future. I think that the only way he can accomplish R&D and such is with a partnership with Business.
And by “Business”, I mean Big Business. I have long thought of Big Business as The Enemy but they do hold the power. They can get things done and they can pressure Republicans to get things done.
Otherwise, it might not matter how correct Obama is. We will all sink into the pitiful state of a once-prosperous country.
Paris
Why is that when people write SOTU, I see STFU.
gbear
@shortstop: It’s a feature, not a bug.
I can’t watch her, and I can’t believe that she’s managed to turn her toxic stupidity into a brand.
I hope she runs against Amy Klobuchar for senate, and we can finally dump her into the political dustbin with Tim Pawlenty.
Dog is My Copilot
My mom lives in the district that Michelle Bachmann represents in Minnesota. She wants to move elsewhere just so she can say Bachmann doesn’t represent her. And that was BEFORE this ingenious rebuttal. I can imagine the moving truck backing up to my folks’ house right now.
gogol's wife
@c u n d gulag:
I laughed at your comment. Didn’t see it elsewhere.
trollhattan
@fanshawe:
It was hidden inside a death panelist, so of course she avoided looking at it. Jess sayin’.
sukabi
@dmsilev: that would have been the ONLY way to view her address… flat, monotone pictures with no sound involved — a perfect representation of where they want this country to be.
Emily L. Hauser/ellaesther
@Loneoak: Well, I’ll follow you, just the same! (And I just now tweeted it).
EdTheRed
Bachmann as a juggalo makes a lot of sense, although I believe the proper phrasing should be:
“F*cking cameras – how do they work?”
Ella in New Mexico
@Flugelhorn:
Chuck Mangione would be ashamed of your moniker. He hated sloppy operations like Bachmann’s. And cacophonic voices like hers, too.
Also too, I was very disappointed that she didn’t pull out her “Full Crazy”. The whole video was about as interesting and innovative as low sodium chicken noodle soup.
GregB
Is this the beginning of The Balloon Head Party?
Joey Maloney
@EdTheRed: Twenty BJ Bucks and a shiny new internet to the first person who Photoshops that up for our amusement!
Cris
@EdTheRed: This blog has a strange relationship to the word “fuck.” The front pagers are generally unhesitant to use the word in the body of their posts, but back off from using it in post titles.
shortstop
@gbear: I believe her sights are set higher than on ungrateful Michigan. After all, she’s “Amaricas Congress Woman.”
Frank
She lost me with that chirpy “The Tea Party is a force for good” — she practically squeaked the word “good”. She reminds me a tiny bit of Mrs. Umbridge from Harry Potter.
quaint irene
Hey, looking incompetent makes you seem folksy and one of the regular guys. She should have also written some notes on her hand.
freelancer
Somebody on Maddowblog commented that she was looking off-camera at the scribbles on Palin’s hand.
Bill Arnold
GW Bush spent at least his first term not knowing how to use a teleprompter. He would shift from left gaze to right gaze and never center on the camera. It was a decent inadvertent imitation of shifty-eyedness.
gbear
@GregB:
They already have a theme song (until Robyn Hitchcock tells them to stop using it)
@shortstop: Did you mean MN?
fucen tarmal
“the tea party is a dynamic force, for good!”
translation: we like both kinds, country & western.
freelancer
Bachmann is blind. It all makes sense now. Thanks Wonkette.
shortstop
@gbear: I certainly did. And I certainly know the difference. Thanks!
tesslibrarian
@Poopyman: Even Stephen Colbert doesn’t talk to his audience with a portrait of himself behind his head; that’s just how he interviews people.
That said, I only was able to take about four sentences before I had to turn it off; she’s looking right at the door to my office, and I’m the only one home. Creepy.
Bachmann talks similarly to the way Bush Jr. did–as though trying to explain something complicated to a small child. I suspect that’s mimicking how their staff has to speak to them, so they mistakenly believe the tone is respectful.
sukabi
@Paris: think that’s survival instinct kicking in… keeps the blood pressure from going into the stratosphere.
de stijl
It’s like watching Hasselhoff trying to eat a hamburger but with worse production values.
Tsulagi
Was hoping for a more stellar loon performance from Crazy Eyes Bachmann, but all in all she delivered a workmanlike job.
Like most for the first minute or two was wondering what the hell she was looking at. Obviously she was reading off a teleprompter to her right, but even so her glaze seemed to be elevated. Thought given the technological prowess, skillz, and all-around intelligence of the baggers most likely they had her reading off a bigass karaoke screen complete with bouncing ball.
Gotta give her some credit. At least in history rewritten in her head she didn’t also too have the Founding Fathers on Iwo Jima. Progress.
genghisjon
takeing the chance that I might piss off Toby Kieth,I’m deeply ashamed that she is from my state.
Arclite
@Southern Beale:
Well, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and Dr. Evil. But not Che Guevara; he wore a t-shirt with his face on it though.
freelancer
@Arclite:
Heh, indeedy.
de stijl
@freelancer:
I was hoping for Che wearing Che wearing Che…. An infinity of Che’s
Herbal Infusion Bagger
I have a weird attraction to her…mind you, I have the same reaction to Drag Queens. Or maybe it’s the crazy, ‘cos I have a lot of crazy female relatives.
elle
@Flugelhorn:
Hmm. Did you actually watch the teaparty video? I don’t think so, because if you had watched it, you would have realised that she was not looking into that camera either. I know this because I watched the teaparty video to make sure.
Ash Can
@elle: That makes it even funnier. Now I’m envisioning the TP camera, the Fox pool camera, and the teleprompter all set up 3-4 feet away from each other. Heckuva job!
Jennifer
I love how they gloss over the “EXPLOSION in deficit spending” in 2009, the last Bush budget year, by coloring it in as if 2009 spending was Obama’s budget.
I guess pointing that out would underline the fact that Obama’s first budget in 2010 was smaller than Bush’s last budget in 2009. To hear these jackholes tell it, the day Obama was sworn in, he immediately started spending tractor-trailer loads of cash.
BDeevDad
I’m wondering how badly the Tea Partiers will misinterpret this (pun intended):
jimmiraybob
@Dave:
That and her bizarre callout to Iwo Jima, which proves she has no grasp of history whatsoever.
Whadda ya mean? When the Founding Fathers finished writing the Constitution and magically ended slavery – through tireless effort – they won the War of Iwo Jima and eventually landed on the moon. You should read more.
sukabi
@jimmiraybob: it helps their storyline if you take about 10 books, rip out all the pages and randomly glue about 250 of those pages back into one binding… then you cross out every 3rd word and voila, history according to conservatives.
kdaug
@Flugelhorn: No, jackass.
Here’s the feed from the Tea Party Express.
She’s still looking off to the right.
Nice fact-checking.
Jackass.
BC
@Jennifer: Yeah, also love that they forget that Obama put the cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on the budget. The wars were off budget (emergency spending) during the Bush years.
jimmiraybob
@sukabi: I wish their history was that coherent.
Herbal Infusion Bagger
Does anyone remember the hearings in 2001 when we had the surpluses from the Clinton era, and wingnuts worried that if we paid off the National Debt, then the gubmint would be buying stocks with its surpluses and how awful that would be. Does anyone remember Greenspan endorsing the Bush tax cuts and how the Dems realized they’d been played by Greenspan, who’d made deficit reduction the quid pro quo for lowering interest rates. Or Gore’s lockbox for the Social Security surpluses and how the wingers laughed at it? Or Cheney saying Reagan proved deficits don’t matter?
Remember that?
And now that it’s a Democrat in the White House, the wingers have got deficit religion all of a sudden. Except when it comes to tax cuts for rich people, of course.
Mr Stagger Lee
@jimmiraybob: And don’t forget, it was Thomas Jefferson, with an assist from John Adams scored the winning goal for the USA in the “Miracle On Ice” back in Lake Placid in 1980
jimmiraybob
@Mr Stagger Lee: To see the gleam in Tommy J’s eye when the puck went in still makes me weepy. Man, they just don’t make founding fathers like that anymore.