Is the Register's Martin Wisckol Part of the Liberal Media Campaign to Build Up and Then Tear Down Michele Bachmann?


Is Martin Wisckol one of the liberal media meddlers a right-sided journalism watchdog warned us about?

Let us seek the clues in a recent write-up by the Orange County Register political reporter on one Michele Bachmann.
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In “Bachmann's Surge Continues in Presidential Bid,” Wisckol points to the tea leaves (Tea Party and otherwise) that indicate she's the GOP candidate with the most momentum right now, a formidable fundraiser and the real anti-Mitt Romney Choice for the Anti-Mitt Romney Generation.


Which is precisely the kind of reporting Don Irvine of Accuracy in Media (AIM), the Bizarro World version of Media Matters for America, warned us about. Irvine believes the liberal media–lamestream media for short–is building up Bachmann now to:

1) Cripple front-runner Romney on the way to the general.

2) Set Bachmann up for the inevitable media backlash ala . . . well . . . anyone who's ever run for anything.

Lemme say right here hats off to Wisckol and his progressive brethren for employing the kind of deviousness their conservative Fox News opposites mastered long, long ago. One also wonders if the lamestream media was not reporting on Bachmann's surge, would AIM and others accuse them of censorship?

But I digress. Wisckol points to the usual suspects–Politico, Time's Mark Halpern and the Commie Trifecta (New York Times/Washington Post/Columbia Journalism Review)–to build his case that Bachmann may not only be the real deal but here to stay to the bitter National Convention end.

Tipping his hand to Irvine's second point about the looming backlash, Wisckol includes parts of a new Rolling Stone piece that he believes echoes the colorful musings of the late Hunter S. Thompson, but I'd argue echo the colorful and more enlightening musings of the not-dead-yet Matt Tiabbi, who is, after all, the writer of the article.

To save you the carpel tunnel from clicking back to Wisckol's post, I'll just include here the relevant Tiabbi passages he cites:

Bachmann is a religious zealot whose brain is a raging electrical
storm of divine visions and paranoid delusions. She believes that the
Chinese are plotting to replace the dollar bill, that light bulbs are
killing our dogs and cats, and that God personally chose her to become
both an IRS attorney who would spend years hounding taxpayers and a
raging anti-tax Tea Party crusader against big government. She kicked
off her unofficial presidential campaign in New Hampshire, by mistakenly
declaring it the birthplace of the American Revolution.

And . . .

Bachmann is exactly the right kind of completely batshit crazy. Not
medically crazy, not talking-to-herself-on-the-subway crazy, but
grandiose crazy, late-stage Kim Jong-Il crazy–crazy in the sense that
she's living completely inside her own mind, frenetically pacing the
hallways of a vast sand castle she's built in there, unable to
meaningfully communicate with the human beings on the other side of the
moat, who are all presumed to be enemies.

Typical Register readers, who might actually be to the right of Bachmann (if that is even possible) and batshit crazier (ditto), would no doubt cringe at the idea that their pipe organ's political reporter is part of the Weather Underground plot to un-do their gal by first building her up. Fortunately for Marty, as many of the read Navel Gazing as they do Rolling Stone.

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