Rogue Rebuttal

Good morning, America. Guess what? Michele Bachmann is the new Sarah Palin. It’s beginning to look like the press has found a bright, new shiny object to cover -- relentlessly.

Best of the irreverent reax:

The Caucus Blog (NYT): “When Ms. Bachmann, Republican of Minnesota, addressed the nation with her own, more alarmist assessment of its state, she seemed almost like the telekinetic high school heroine of ‘Carrie.’ It wasn’t just what she said ... [it] was the way Ms. Bachmann spoke, smiling and gesturing with an intensity that almost cracked the screen.”

Timothy Egan (NYT): “Representative Michele ‘Don’t-Know-Much-About-History’ Bachmann made fellow Republicans cringe with her insistence on a rogue rebuttal. After wiping slavery from the history books last weekend in her version of how America came to be, Bachmann showed she is as good at making stuff up from the past as she is at reconstituting the present. ... As a face of the opposition, she’s an answered prayer to the White House.” (Read his witty piece here.)

Dana Milbank (Washington Post): “Bachmann's Tea Party response had all the altitude of a punch to the gut.”

Steve Benen (Washington Monthly): “Watching the nearly seven minutes of blistering stupidity, it was hard to avoid the fact that Bachmann has created some bizarro world for herself, detached from the reality the rest of us live in. ... The importance of this is that Republicans seemed more than a little annoyed yesterday that Bachmann was muddling their message and making the GOP look bad with her wild-eyed craziness.”

Esquire: “Representative Michele Bachmann needs to work on not looking up and to the right of the camera lens, like she's waiting for the crew from the Nervous Hospital to bust in and drag her off. ... Make no mistake: Michele Bachmann is a howling loon — a woman with no compunction at all about lying through her not inconsiderable teeth about virtually everything.”

Andy Borowitz (Comedian): In her official Tea Party response to President Obama's [SOTU], Rep. Michele Bachmann offered a bold new policy initiative she called 'Don't Add, Don't Spell.' [She] called the proposal 'a reflection of core Tea Party values' and said it would 'deliver the American people from the tyranny of arithmetic, spelling, and punctuation.'"

And these were the nicer comments. Welcome to the media circus, Ms. Bachmann. You've earned it.