Back to Everyday Craziness

Now that South Carolina governor Mark Sanford has been located safe and sound - it turns out he sneaked off to Argentina for a few days of romping with a woman not his wife - we now rejoin our normal political insanity, already in progress.

Let's see, to whom can we turn to bring a note of complete batshit craziness to our everyday life? Of course - Representative Michele Bachmann! You may recall Bachmann from her earlier close encounters with weird conspiracy theories, including:

• Claiming the White House is conspiring with other countries to introduce a one-world currency
• Accusing then-candidate Barack Obama and others in Congress of being "anti-American"
• Calling the SCHIP health-insurance program for children a "magnet" for illegal immigrants
• Saying that a law expanding AmeriCorps and increasing opportunities for volunteering creates "re-education camps for young people"
• Urging violence over the issue of global warming, saying, "I want people in Minnesota armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax because we need to fight back"

This list could go on forever, but you get the idea. She does not so much embrace every conspiracy theory that comes down the pike as rip its clothes off, throw it down on the bed and have her way with it. (No word yet on whether she believes President Obama to be a dictatorial Muslim usurper.) Indeed, her image as an inhabitant of Bizarro World reduced her to claiming, "This is not Michele Bachmann being a kook."

Anyway, she's back. In the middle of one of her usual rants about the community-organizing group ACORN last week, Bachmann loudly said she will refuse to fill out anything on her Census form. The rationale for this was that since the government is hiring outside organizations for the Census' door-to-door legwork, she's afraid that ACORN (boogity-boogity) will somehow get hold of and misuse the data.

Never mind that refusing to participate in the Census is illegal. Or that violating a Census participant's privacy can get you five years in prison and a $25,000 fine. Or that socioeconomic questions asked either in the short Census form or the longer American Community Survey form are used to determine how federal tax dollars are distributed among states and localities. Or even that ACORN won't be involved at all in collecting Census responses.

Paranoia must be assuaged, you see, and so Bachmann stepped up to the plate again today, warning that Census data can be misused. And she did it by invoking the specter of the Japanese-American internment during World War II:

If we look at American history, between 1942 and 1947, the data that was collected by the census bureau was handed over to the FBI and other organizations, at the request of President Roosevelt, and that's how the Japanese were rounded up and put into the internment camps. I'm not saying that's what the Administration is planning to do. But I am saying that private, personal information that was given to the census bureau in the 1940s was used against Americans to round them up.

You can almost hear her screaming it from the rooftops: "Obama and ACORN will put you all in prison!"

Her tactics are typical: spew out fear and paranoia by warning of hideous things that no one is planning (indeed, that no one in their right minds would possibly consider) and then walk it back ever so slightly by saying "well, I don't think they're planning that."

But considering the killings which have taken place in the last few months - killings very likely inspired by the continuing torrent of hate and fear in the conservative media - is it paranoid to worry about the safety of Census workers? What if someone really believes that the local Census worker who comes to the door is actually on a secret mission to identify "undesirables?" What happens then?

Bachmann's wingnut craziness may be entertaining, but it masks a very disturbing trend in America. Can we stop it before more people get killed?