The tragedy isn’t that anyone would even bother to critique Newsweek for its cover photo revealing Michele Bachmann’s natural aura of insanity, but that someone with the intellectual and psychological deprivations of this manifestly lost soul could be elected to higher office, even from a backwater district in Minnesota; and that a meretricious media would elevate her to a position of legitimacy as a presidential candidate with its banal pontification and lavish attention.   

But here’s a clue: if you allow someone to take your picture, you can’t blame those who publish the picture for how you actually look. In this case, it’s not Bachmann complaining, since she’s vacuuming up the publicity like an amphetamine jonesing aardvark, while milking the juicy victimhood in the patented Palin-Bachmann tradition of “Po me”. However every Republican accomplished enough to peck out words with his nose or opposable thumbs on a computer keyboard or to speak rudimentary English in front of a TV light has tried to make a federal case. A word of advice: Michele’s is a high-wattage borderline personality disorder no amount of cheesecloth or muslin can possibly shade.

If anything, having her on the cover of a prominent newsmagazine belies the reality of how phantasmagorically ignorant and unstable the woman truly is. When she makes the cover of Psychology Today we may celebrate at last the congruency of reality and fame.

And speaking of the famously unhinged and ungifted elevated to public office and public legitimacy in this new Hall of Mirrors world of ours, Sarah Palin said yesterday, “Blaming the Tea Party for our credit downgrade is akin to Nero blaming the Christians for burning Rome. Tea Party Americans weren’t the ones ‘fiddling’ while our country’s fiscal house was going up in smoke.”

Sometimes they just fall into your lap, but I still intend to point out that George Bush Jr. and his Republican congress actually poured the gasoline and cheerfully applied the flame that burned the economy down to the bare ground.  Considering that George inherited a 242 billion dollar surplus, and he and his Republican congress ran up seven trillion in debt before 2006, and raised the debt ceiling 5 times, Palin has eclipsed her own earlier records for truly astounding dumbassery.

But back to The Bachmann. Here’s the Top Ten List of the craziest things the Flying Monkey of Minnesota has launched forth from her own gob, courtesy of thinkprogress:

 1) BACHMANN WARNED ‘THE LION KING’ WAS GAY PROPAGANDA: At the November 2004 EdWatch National Education Conference, Bachmann said the “normalization” of homosexuality would lead to “desensitization”: “Very effective way to do this with a bunch of second graders, is take a picture of ‘The Lion King’for instance, and a teacher might say, ‘Do you know that the music for this movie was written by a gay man?’ The message is: I’m better at what I do, because I’m gay.”

(2) BACHMANN CLAIMED ABOLISHING THE MINIMUM WAGE WOULD CREATE JOBS: While testifying in front of the Minnesota Senate in 2005, Bachmann said, “Literally, 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.” This isn’t remotely true. Even simply reducing the minimum wage would, as Paul Krugman noted, “at best do nothing for employment; more likely it would actually be contractionary.”

(3) BACHMANN CLAIMED THAT SCIENTISTS ARE SUPPORTERS OF INTELLIGENT DESIGN: During a 2006 debate, Bachmann said, “There are hundreds and hundreds of scientists, many of them holding Nobel Prizes, who believe in intelligent design.” This was, and is, not true.

(4) BACHMANN CLAIMED TERRI SCHIAVO WAS ‘HEALTHY’: Not long after Terri Schiavo died, Bachmann said she would have voted for the Palm Sunday Compromise because Schiavo “was healthy. She had brain damage — there was brain damage, there was no question. But from a health point of view, she was not terminally ill.” An autopsy found that Schiavo had suffered irreversible brain damage and her brain, said the medical examiner, was “profoundly atrophied.”

(5) BACHMANN LIKENED VISITING IRAQ TO VISITING MALL OF AMERICA: In 2007, Bachmann returned from a junket to Iraq and told her colleagues, “[T]here’s a commonality with the Mall of America, in that it’s on that proportion. There’s marble everywhere. The other thing I remarked about was there is water everywhere.” As ThinkProgress documented at the time, the comparison was preposterous.

(6) BACHMANN CLAIMED THAT CARBON DIOXIDE IS ‘HARMLESS’: In 2008, a Stanford scientist revealed “direct links” between increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and “increases in human mortality” — globally, he found that as many as “20,000 air-pollution-related deaths per year per degree Celsius may be due to this greenhouse gas.” The next year, Bachmann, who is not a scientist, said that “carbon dioxide is portrayed as harmful. But there isn’t even one study that can be produced that shows that carbon dioxide is a harmful gas.”

(7) BACHMANN CALLED FOR A CONGRESSIONAL WITCH HUNT: Pivoting off the news of Barack Obama’s alleged relationship to former Weather Underground member William Ayers, and his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Bachmann accused the candidate of having “anti-American views.” She then suggested that Congressional liberals — including Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid — ought to be subject to “an exposé” by the media because of their views. “I think people would love to see like that,” she told a stunned Chris Matthews.

(8) BACHMANN SUGGESTED GAY SINGER SHOULD REPENT AFTER GETTING CANCER: Bachmann saw Melissa Etheridge’s cancer as a teachable moment: “Unfortunately she is now suffering from breast cancer, so keep her in your prayers,” she said in November 2004. “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.”

(9) BACHMANN BOASTED ABOUT BREAKING THE LAW: In advance of the 2010 national Census, Bachmann told The Washington Times that she would break the law by not completing the forms. “I know for my family, the only question we will be answering is how many people are in our home,” she said. “We won’t be answering any information beyond that, because the Constitution doesn’t require any information beyond that.”

(10) BACHMANN CLAIMED THAT GLENN BECK COULD SOLVE THE DEBT CRISIS: During a February trip to South Carolina, Bachmann told a South Carolina audience, “I think if we give Glenn Beck the numbers, he can solve this [the national debt].”