WE'RE DOOMED AS A NATION

Michele Bachmann delivered a speech to an extremely friendly home-state crowd at the RightOnline conference. Dave Weigel reports that she has loopy thoughts about issues you didn't know she had loopy thoughts about:

"When Obama became president, gold was $940 an ounce," she said. "Today it's $1500 an ounce. Has the president failed us on keeping the soundness of the currency? You bet he has!"

Yup, she's not just a paranoid -- now she's a Paulist paranoid.

Then, after a bit of deficit talk, she goes into her recent conspiracy theory (the mockery of which by some commenters, needless to say, doesn't bother her one bit):

But then came the Medicare argument. Bachmann's case, as it was in New Orleans, is that seniors deserve to keep what is effectively a single-payer system. If the ACA is not repealed, "they'll be rolled into Obamacare. That's the future for senior citizens in this country. And nobody is telling this story." She warned them of the rationing that would come, augered by the rising costs of plans. "This is your intro to ObamaCare. You're not getting more care. This is the future for you."

But that isn't the scary part. The scary part is what Weigel writes right after that:

"She plays well in person," one reporter confided to me, sotto voce. "She does not seem crazy."

There you have it, folks. Democracy require a well-informed citizenry, and, well, that's the voice of the people doing the informing.

We're doomed.

The woman judges the president's stewardship of the economy based on the price of gold, then argues that the president is trying to force senior citizens out of our highly popular socialized health care program into a for-profit system (presumably because he's a socialist) -- and a reporter hearing that tells us she doesn't sound crazy.

And no, I don't think it was a right-wing reporter -- I read Weigel a lot, and he'd have said so. This is the mainstream media. Maybe "lamestream" really is the appropriate name for these folks.