Remember when this photo of Michele Bachmann caused such a furor last week?  The outrage was driven by a belief in certain quarters that Newsweek had intentionally chosen an unflattering pic of Congresswoman Bachmann for their cover.  In short, the picture makes her look kinda crazy and her supporters resented that.  There may be some truth to the charges, but Newsweek (or anyone else) could more easily have made Michele look like the lunatic she is by featuring her words rather than her pictures.  This is the woman, after all, who recently signed an anti-gay marriage pledge which includes, among other batshit insane goodies, this gem:

Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA's first African-American President

Really? There's no mention there of the fact that slave families were routinely  broken up and sold away from each other, or that it was permissible for slave owners to rape their female property. Now there's family values for you! 

Anyway, in the interest of letting Ms. Bachmann set the record straight on whether she's nuts or not, here are a few of her greatest hits:

"And what a bizarre time we're in, when a judge will say to little children that you can't say the pledge of allegiance, but you must learn that homosexuality is normal and you should try it."

"[Gay marriage] is probably the biggest issue that will impact our state and our nation in the last, at least, thirty years. I am not understating that."

“It’s part of Satan I think to say that this is 'gay.' It’s anything but gay.”

"If we took away the minimum wage -- if conceivably it was gone -- we could potentially virtually wipe out unemployment completely because we would be able to offer jobs at whatever level."

"I was wondering, if most employers are already doing this anyway, isn't minimum wage really just superfluous? Why do we even have one?" 

"Unfortunately she [Melissa Etheridge] is now suffering from breast cancer, so keep her in your prayers.  This may be an opportunity for her now to be open to some spiritual things, now that she is suffering with that physical disease. She is a lesbian.”

"I think if we give Glenn Beck the numbers, he can solve this [the national debt].”

"Iran is the troublemaker trying to tip over apple carts all over Baghdad right now because they want America to pull out. And you know why? It’s because they’ve already decided, that they’re going to territory, they’re- they’re going to partition Iraq and half of Iraq, the western northern portion of Iraq is going to be called, the United, uh, uh, the, the uh, -oh, I’m sorry, I can’t remember the actual name of it now, but it’s going to be called, um, uh, the, the, uh, uh the Iraq State of Islam, something like that. And I-I’m sorry, I-I don’t have the official name, but it is meant to be the training ground for the terrorists. There’s already an agreement made; they’re going to get half of Iraq and that is going to be a –a terrorist free, -a terrorist safe haven zone."

"We’re in a state of crisis where our nation is literally ripping apart at the seams right now, and lawlessness is occurring from one ocean to the other. And we’re seeing the fulfillment of the Book of Judges here in our own time, where every man doing that which is right in his own eyes—in other words, anarchy."

"This [health care reform] cannot pass…What we have to do today is make a covenant, to slit our wrists, be blood brothers on this thing. This will not pass."

“The big thing we are working on now is the global warming hoax. It’s all voodoo, nonsense, hokum, a hoax.”

"Carbon dioxide is natural, it is not harmful, it is a part of Earth's lifecycle. And yet we're being told that we have to reduce this natural substance, reduce the American standard of living, to create an arbitrary reduction in something that is naturally occuring in Earth."

“There are hundreds and hundreds of scientists, many of them holding Nobel Prizes, who believe in intelligent design.”

And etcetera. To me, the scary thing about Michele Bachmann isn't that she believes the ridiculous crap she believes; it is that the American Right has swung so far toward the fringe that a person like her is polling at the top of the pack for Republican presidential contenders.  On the other hand, I can think of no better way to guarantee a GOP defeat in 2012 than to have Bachmann win her party's nomination, though sadly the Republican establishment isn't likely to let that happen.  

Now for some bonus photos of Michele Bachman looking not only crazy but also libidinally lethal. The first pic I saw on Robert Crook's blog; the second I found somewhere else online and included it here to show that there are men as well as women who have no business eating tube-shaped meat.

Gah!

That's Michele's husband, Marcus Bachmann, being shown how wrong it is to lust after other men's junk. I can't decide which of these two images is more disturbing.