Did all that Tea Party horseshit even happen? Or was it just a fake media event? I've read two books on the subject -- Kate Zernike: Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America (2010, Times Books), and Jill Lepore: The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle Over American History -- the former claiming it's a big deal and the latter contrasting myths and historical facts. Someone will no doubt do something more systematic in the near future, but unless they get into who paid for what and why you won't really have much. On the other hand, one thing you do have is Michele Bachmann, who rose from backbench Republican to media star almost wholly on her claim to be the Tea Party's political voice. Which is one reason why the Tea Party was nothing more than mass hallucination: if not, someone would come forth to discredit her.

Bachmann's presidential campaign is an improbable one, but she's already all but knocked out her two closest competitors: her fellow (and senior) Minnesota Republican, Tim Pawlenty, who looks confused and pathetic trying to outflank her on the right; meanwhile, although early on she was dubbed "Sarah Palin's stunt double," she stole that role so completely Palin rarely bothers even to phone it in.

Let's start with: Mat Taibbi: Michele Bachmann's Holy War.

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. "It's your state that fired the shot that was heard around the world!" she gushed. "You are the state of Lexington and Concord, you started the battle for liberty right here in your backyard." [ . . . ]

Bachmann's story, to hear her tell it, is about a suburban homemaker who is chosen by God to become a politician who will restore faith and family values to public life and do battle with secular humanism. But by the time you've finished reviewing her record of lies and embellishments and contradictions, you'll have no idea if she actually believes in her own divine inspiration, or whether it's a big con job.

Taibbi flips through her biography: born Michele Amble in Waterloo, IA, but grew up in Anoka, MN. In her teens, parents divorced; mother remarried, expanding her family to nine step-siblings. Found Jesus at 16. Attended Winona State University, where she "met a doltish, like-minded believer named Marcus Bachmann. After college, they moved to Oklahoma, "where Michele entered one of the most ridiculous learning institutions in the Western Hemisphere, a sort of highway rest area with legal accreditation called the O.W. Coburn School of Law":

Michele was a member of its inaugural class in 1979.

Originally a division of Oral Roberts University, this august academy, dedicated to the teaching of "the law from a biblical worldview," has gone through no fewer than three names -- including the Christian Broadcasting Network School of Law. Those familiar with the darker chapters in George W. Bush's presidency might recognize the school's current name, the Regent University School of Law. Yes, this was the tiny educational outhouse that, despite being the 136th-ranked law school in the country, where 60 percent of graduates flunked the bar, produced a flood of entrants into the Bush Justice Department.

Regent was unabashed in its desire that its graduates enter government and become "change agents" who would help bring the law more in line with "eternal principles of justice," i.e., biblical morality. To that end, Bachmann was mentored by a crackpot Christian extremist professor named John Eidsmoe, a frequent contributor to John Birch Society publications who once opined that he could imagine Jesus carrying an M16 and who spent considerable space in one of his books musing about the feasibility of criminalizing blasphemy. [ . . . ]

When Bachmann finished her studies in Oklahoma, Marcus instructed her to do her postgraduate work in tax law -- a command Michele took as divinely ordained. She would later profess to complete surprise at God's choice for her field of study. "Tax law? I hate taxes," she said. "Why should I go and do something like that?" Still, she sucked it up and did as she was told. "The Lord says: Be submissive, wives, you are to be submissive to your husbands."

They then moved to Stillwater, MN, "where they raised their five children and took in 23 foster kids." She worked for the IRS, then quit in 1993, edging into politics: "she didn't become a major player in Stillwater until she joined a group of fellow Christian activists to form New Heights, one of the first charter schools in America."

But before long, parents began to complain that Bachmann and her cronies were trying to bombard the students with Christian dogma -- advocating the inclusion of something called the "12 Biblical Principles" into the curriculum, pushing the teaching of creationism and banning the showing of the Disney movie Aladdin because it promoted witchcraft.

"One member of Michele's entourage talked about how he had visions, and that God spoke to him directly," recalled Denise Stephens, a parent who was opposed to the religious curriculum at New Heights. "He told us that as Christians we had to lay our lives down for it. I remember getting in the car with my husband afterward and telling him, 'This is a cult.'"

Under pressure from parents, Bachmann resigned from New Heights. But the experience left her with a hang-up about the role of the state in public education. She was soon mobilizing against an educational-standards program called Profile of Learning, an early precursor to No Child Left Behind. Under the program, state educators and local businesses teamed up to craft a curriculum that would help young people prepare for the work force -- but Bachmann saw through their devious scheme. "She thought it was a socialist plot to turn our children into little worker-automatons," says Bill Prendergast, a Stillwater resident who wrote for the town's newspaper and has documented every step of Bachmann's career. [ . . . ]

Bachmann's anti-standards crusade led her to her first political run. In 1999, she joined four other Republicans in Stillwater in an attempt to seize control of the school board. The "Slate of Five" proved unpopular: The GOP candidates finished dead last. Bachmann learned her lesson. "Since then, she has never abdicated control of her campaign or her message to anyone," says Cecconi, who defeated Bachmann in the race -- which remains the only election Bachmann has ever lost.

There follows the story of how she came to run for the Minnesota State Senate in 2006, which I won't try to straighten out. Taibbi's uptake:

Bachmann's entire political career has followed this exact same pattern of God-speaks-directly-to-me fundamentalism mixed with pathological, relentless, conscienceless lying. She's not a liar in the traditional way of politicians, who tend to lie dully, usefully and (they hope) believably, often with the aim of courting competing demographics at the same time. That's not what Bachmann's thing is. Bachmann lies because she can't help it, because it's a built-in component of both her genetics and her ideology. She is at once the most entertaining and the most dangerous kind of liar, a turbocharged cross between a born bullshit artist and a religious fanatic, for whom lying to the infidel is a kind of holy duty.

It has taken just over 10 years for Bachmann to go from small-town PTA maven to serious presidential contender, a testament to both her rare and unerring talent for generating media attention, and to her truly astonishing energy level and narcissistic tenacity. Minnesota politicians who have squared off against Bachmann all speak with a kind of horrified reverence for her martial indomitability, her brilliantly fortifying lack of self-doubt, even the fact that she hasn't appeared to physically age at all in 10 years.

Taibbi complains that "since then, getting herself elected is pretty much the only thing she has accomplished in politics," but follows with a long story sequence showing that while she hasn't passed any laws or legislative things like that, she has garnered a whole lot of press, and fares as well with the bad as with the good.

Given how Bachmann's stature rises every time she does something we laugh at, it's no wonder she's set her strangely unfocused eyes on the White House. Since arriving in Congress, she has been a human tabloid-copy machine, spouting one copy-worthy lunacy after another. She launched a fierce campaign against compact fluorescent lights, claiming that the energy-saving bulbs contain mercury and pose a "very real threat to children, disabled people, pets, senior citizens." She blasted the 2010 census as a government plot and told people not to comply because the U.S. Constitution doesn't require citizens to participate, when in fact it does. She told her constituents to be "armed and dangerous" in their resistance to cap-and-trade limits on climate-warming pollution. She insisted that Obama's trip to India cost taxpayers $200 million a day, and claimed that Nancy Pelosi had spent $100,000 on booze on state-paid flights aboard military jets.

This is not to say that Bachmann hasn't played a prominent role in Congress. Most significantly, she cannily positioned herself as the congressional champion of the Tea Party; last summer she formed a Tea Party caucus, which she now leads.

In other words, her Tea Party credentials are largely self-made, but who's going to challenge her claim? Charles Koch? Not very likely given that the Tea Party is allegedly a grassroots movement, led by no one. But Bachmann's used it to claim a level of legitimacy that she'd never have otherwise. Taibbi argues that she has a chance:

Even other Republicans, it seems, are making the mistake of laughing at Bachmann. But consider this possibility: She wins Iowa, then swallows the Tea Party and Christian vote whole for the next 30 or 40 primaries while Romney and Pawlenty battle fiercely over who is the more "viable" boring-white-guy candidate. Then Wall Street blows up again -- and it's Barack Obama and a soaring unemployment rate versus a white, God-fearing mother of 28 from the heartland.

It could happen. Michele Bachmann has found the flaw in the American Death Star. She is a television camera's dream, a threat to do or say something insane at any time, the ultimate reality-show protagonist. She has brilliantly piloted a media system that is incapable of averting its eyes from a story, riding that attention to an easy conquest of an overeducated cultural elite from both parties that is far too full of itself to understand the price of its contemptuous laughter. All of those people out there aren't voting for Michele Bachmann. They're voting against us. And to them, it turns out, we suck enough to make anyone a contender.

Now we can move on to Ryan Lizza: Leap of Faith: The Making of a Republican Front-Runner. Lizza starts off getting on Bachmann's chartered jet from Washington to Iowa.

The only senior member of the [Bachmann's campaign] team not making the trip was Ed Rollins, Bachmann's campaign manager. Rollins is famous in Washington for two things: managing Ronald Reagan's successful reëlection campaign against Walter Mondale in 1984, and developing poisonous relationships with most of his high-profile employers since then. They have included George H.W. Bush ("the worst campaigner to actually get elected President," according to Rollins), Ross Perot ("a paranoid lunatic on an ego trip"), and Arianna Huffington ("the most ruthless, unscrupulous, and ambitious person I'd met in thirty years in national politics"). More recently, he has managed the campaign of Mike Huckabee, appeared frequently on CNN, and worked in corporate public relations.

As for the candidate:

Bachmann belongs to a generation of Christian conservatives whose views have been shaped by institutions, tracts, and leaders not commonly known to secular Americans, or even to most Christians. Her campaign is going to be a conversation about a set of beliefs more extreme than those of any American politician of her stature, including Sarah Palin, to whom she is inevitably compared. Bachmann said in 2004 that being gay is "personal enslavement," and that, if same-sex marriage were legalized, "little children will be forced to learn that homosexuality is normal and natural and that perhaps they should try it." Speaking about gay-rights activists, that same year, she said, "It is our children that is the prize for this community." She believes that evolution is a theory that has "never been proven," and that intelligent design should be taught in schools.

Bachmann's assertions on these issues are, unsurprisingly, disputed. She is also often criticized for making factual errors on less controversial matters. As commentators quickly pointed out, the President during the first swine-flu outbreak was a Republican, Gerald Ford [she had claimed Jimmy Carter, along with Obama linking swine-flu outbreaks to Democratic presidents]. She got into more trouble this spring when, during a trip to Iowa before she announced her candidacy, she told a long story about her family's roots in the state.

Long story ensues, the upshot being that she managed to get most of her personal story wrong. Then biographical background, follows Taibbi above closely, except adds this bit:

In 1974, the year Bachmann graduated from high school, she spent the summer on a kibbutz near Beersheba, Israel, with a program that was something like Outward Bound for Christians. The trip gave her a connection to Israel, a state whose creation, many American evangelicals believe, is prophesied in the Bible. (St. Paul, in the Letter to the Romans, says that Jews will one day gather again in their homeland; modern fundamentalists see this, along with the coming of the Antichrist, as presaging the Rapture.) "Our job was to get up at four in the morning and go out to the cotton fields and pick weeds," Bachmann told me. "When we would go out in the morning, we would have soldiers that would go with us, and their job was to go through the fields to make sure that there weren't any mines."

In 1975 she enrolled at Winona State University, met and married Marcus Bachmann. In 1977 they "experienced a second life-altering event" watching a series of films by Francis Schaeffer:

Schaeffer, who ran a mission in the Swiss Alps known as L'Abri ("the shelter"), opposed liberal trends in theology. One of the most influential evangelical thinkers of the nineteen-seventies and early eighties, he has been credited with getting a generation of Christians involved in politics. Schaeffer's film series consists of ten episodes tracing the influence of Christianity on Western art and culture, from ancient Rome to Roe v. Wade. In the films, Schaeffer -- who has a white goatee and is dressed in a shearling coat and mountain climber's knickers -- condemns the influence of the Italian Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Darwin, secular humanism, and postmodernism. He repeatedly reminds viewers of the "inerrancy" of the Bible and the necessity of a Biblical world view. "There is only one real solution, and that's right back where the early church was," Schaeffer tells his audience. "The early church believed that only the Bible was the final authority. What these people really believed and what gave them their whole strength was in the truth of the Bible as the absolute infallible word of God."

Schaeffer, by the way, is a key figure in Max Blumenthal's Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party. Although Schaeffer was absolutely rabid on abortion, he turned out to be rather soft on homosexuality, so his followers wound up picking and choosing. His son Frank Schaeffer, who directed the films in question, later had second thoughts, writing Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back. Lizza continues:

Schaeffer died in 1984. I asked his son Frank, who directed the movies -- and who has since left the evangelical movement and become a novelist -- about the change in tone. He told me that it all had to do with Roe v. Wade, which was decided by the Supreme Court while the film was being made. "Those first episodes are what Francis Schaeffer is doing while he was sitting in Switzerland having nice discussions with people who came through to find Jesus and talk about culture and art," he said. But then the Roe decision came, and "it wasn't a theory anymore. Now 'they' are killing babies. Then everything started getting unhinged. It wasn't just that we disagreed with the Supreme Court; it's that they're evil. It isn't just that the federal government may be taking too much power; now they are abusing it. We had been warning that humanism followed to its logical conclusion without Biblical absolutes is going to go into terrible places, and, look, it's happening right before our very eyes. Once that happens, everything becomes a kind of holy war, and if not an actual conspiracy then conspiracy-like."

Francis Schaeffer instructed his followers and students at L'Abri that the Bible was not just a book but "the total truth." He was a major contributor to the school of thought now known as Dominionism, which relies on Genesis 1:26, where man is urged to "have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth." Sara Diamond, who has written several books about evangelical movements in America, has succinctly defined the philosophy that resulted from Schaeffer's interpretation: "Christians, and Christians alone, are Biblically mandated to occupy all secular institutions until Christ returns."

In 1981, three years before he died, Schaeffer published "A Christian Manifesto," a guide for Christian activism, in which he argues for the violent overthrow of the government if Roe v. Wade isn't reversed. In his movie, Schaeffer warned that America's descent into tyranny would not look like Hitler's or Stalin's; it would probably be guided stealthily, by "a manipulative, authoritarian élite."

That is, by someone much like Barack Obama. Lizza cites Nancy Pearcey's Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity as developing this worldview further:

When, in 2005, the Minneapolis Star Tribune asked Bachmann what books she had read recently, she mentioned two: Ann Coulter's Treason, a jeremiad that accuses liberals of lacking patriotism, and Pearcey's Total Truth, which Bachmann told me was a "wonderful" book.

As Taibbi notes, Bachman went to O.W. Coburn School of Law in Oklahoma:

The first issue of the law review, Journal of Christian Jurisprudence, explains the two goals of the school: "to equip our students with the ability to bring God's healing power to reconcile individuals and to restore community wholeness," and "to restore law to its historic roots in the Bible."

Among the professors were Herbert W. Titus, a Vice-Presidential candidate of the far-right U.S. Taxpayers Party (now called the Constitution Party), and John Whitehead, who started the Rutherford Institute, a conservative legal-advocacy group. The law review published essays by Schaeffer and Rousas John Rushdoony, a prominent Dominionist who has called for a pure Christian theocracy in which Old Testament law -- execution for adulterers and homosexuals, for example -- would be instituted. In a 1982 essay in the law review, Rushdoony condemned the secularization of public schools and declared, "With the coming collapse of humanistic statism, the Christian must prepare to take over, he must prepare for victory." [ . . . ]

Bachmann worked for a professor named John Eidsmoe, who got her interested in the burgeoning homeschool movement. She helped him build a database of state homeschooling statutes, assisting his crusade to reverse laws that prevented parents from homeschooling their children. After that, Bachmann worked as Eidsmoe's research assistant on his book Christianity and the Constitution, published in 1987.

Eidsmoe explained to me how the Coburn School of Law, in the years that Bachmann was there, wove Christianity into the legal curriculum. "Say we're talking in criminal law, and we get to the subject of the insanity defense," he said. "Well, Biblically speaking, is there such a thing as insanity and is it a defense for a crime? We might look back to King David when he's captured by the Philistines and he starts frothing at the mouth, playing crazy and so on." When Biblical law conflicted with American law, Eidsmoe said, O.R.U. students were generally taught that "the first thing you should try to do is work through legal means and political means to get it changed."

Christianity and the Constitution is ostensibly a scholarly work about the religious beliefs of the Founders, but it is really a brief for political activism. Eidsmoe writes that America "was and to a large extent still is a Christian nation," and that "our culture should be permeated with a distinctively Christian flavoring." When I asked him if he believed that Bachmann's views were fully consistent with the prevailing ideology at O.R.U. and the themes of his book, he said, "Yes." Later, he added, "I do not know of any way in which they are not." [ . . . ]

Bachmann has not, however, distanced herself, and she has long described her work for Eidsmoe as an important part of her résumé. This spring, she told a church audience in Iowa, "I went down to Oral Roberts University, and one of the professors that had a great influence on me was an Iowan named John Eidsmoe. He's from Iowa, and he's a wonderful man. He has theology degrees, he has law degrees, he's absolutely brilliant. He taught me about so many aspects of our godly heritage."

In 1986, the Bachmanns moved to Virginia Beach, where Marcus "earned a master's degree in counselling at Pat Robertson's C.B.N. University, now known as Regent University," and Michele studied tax law at the College of William and Mary. They then moved back to Minnesota, where Bachmann worked for the I.R.S.

Two of Bachmann's five children were born while she worked for the I.R.S., and all six former colleagues said that the primary fact they remembered about Bachmann was that she spent a good portion of her time on maternity leave -- the I.R.S. had a fairly generous policy -- and that caused resentment.

"Basically, the rest of us that were here were handling Michele's inventory," one former colleague said. "In her four years, she probably didn't get more than two, two and a half years of experience. So she was doing lightweight stuff." A second colleague said, "She was an attorney here, but she was never here." (Bachmann declined a request to respond.) [ . . . ]

After the birth of her fourth child, in 1992, Bachmann left the I.R.S. to be a stay-at-home mother. The Bachmanns also began taking in foster children, all of whom were teen-age girls and many of whom had eating disorders. Bachmann's motivation seems to have been to save the girls, in the same way that she had been saved. "In my heart, God put something in me toward young people that I wanted to make sure the Gospel would go out to young people," she said, in 2006. "So that young people could come to know Jesus at an early age, the earlier the better, so that they wouldn't have to go through those pitfalls." [ . . . ]

In 1993, Bachmann became disturbed by schoolwork the foster children were bringing home. One high-school math assignment involved a coloring project. She began to wonder what had happened to the disciplined education system of her youth. When she was in school, she said in a speech, "the shop teacher also had a board hung up in the shop class with holes bored in it, and he would use that on the backside if somebody got out of line. Anybody remember those days? That's when I grew up. And it worked really well." Her foster children's homework, she continued, "had more to do with indoctrinating kids than educating kids. And the indoctrination had to do with anti-parent themes, anti-Biblical themes, anti-education themes, anti-academic themes."

Such concerns over education got her into politics (as Taibbi also relates).

Around this time, Bachmann became interested in the writings of David A. Noebel, the founder and director of Summit Ministries, an educational organization founded to reverse the harmful effects of what it calls "our current post-Christian culture." He was a longtime John Birch Society member, whose pamphlets include "The Homosexual Revolution: End Time Abomination," and "Communism, Hypnotism, and the Beatles," in which Noebel argued that the band was being used by Communists to infiltrate the minds of young Americans. Bachmann once gave a speech touting her relationship with Noebel's organization. "I went on to serve on the board of directors with Summit Ministries," she said, adding that Summit's message is "wonderful and worthwhile." She has also recommended to supporters Noebel's "Understanding the Times," a book that is popular in the Christian homeschooling movement. In it, he explains that the "Secular Humanist worldview" is one of America's greatest threats. Bachmann's analysis of education law similarly veered off into conspiratorial warnings. "Government now will be controlling people," she said during one lecture on education, at a church in Minnesota.

There is a section here on "Michele's Must Read List," including a biography of Robert E. Lee by J. Steven Wilkins, who argues that African slaves brought to America were "essentially lucky" -- after all, what better way to be saved by Christianity?

Bachmann, meanwhile, takes pains to stake her candidacy on the treasured word "liberty":

Bachmann and her political consultants also know that her inoffensive ode to liberty is necessary because many voters don't respond well to religious language. The more Bachmann talks about God, the more she is likely to be asked about Schaeffer, Eidsmoe, Noebel, and some of the other exotic influences on her thinking. The success of her campaign will rest partly on her ability to keep these influences, which she has talked about for years, out of the public discussion. As I started getting deeper into a conversation with her about Schaeffer, she abruptly ended the interview. She said she had to leave for an appearance on "Hannity" but would try to set up another time to talk. I didn't hear from her again. Her press secretary later told me that Bachmann "wasn't comfortable with the line of questions, and that's why there wasn't a follow-up conversation."

The second risk to Bachmann's campaign is one that's harder to control. Part of what's so appealing about her is that she speaks passionately and off the cuff. But she often seems to speak before she thinks, garbles words, mixes up history, or says things that don't make sense. At some point, when more people are paying attention, she might go just a bit too far.

Alex Pareene has a review of Lizza's piece:

That's just the bits of the profile dealing with Bachmann's spiritual and ideological mentors and influences. I didn't even paste the amazing Marcus Bachmann color or the tale of her horrible religious charter school or the many stories of how much Bachmann lies about her own background -- go read the whole thing!

Even in a post-Glenn Beck world where far-right extremism has become fairly normalized and occasionally embraced by a Republican Party that used to at least act embarrassed about its neo-Confederates and John Birchers and straight-up theocrats, Bachmann's ideological background is both radically anti-American (in the sense that America is a pluralist nation founded on Enlightenment values and not a pro-slavery Christian theocracy) and way, way outside the "mainstream." She's not just a hard-right-winger -- and not just a slightly dim "nut" -- but a full-on fringe character, a bigot following a bizarre strain of born-againism that even your average American evangelical would find too conspiracy-obsessed and ahistorical to be palatable.

Also see Michelle Goldberg: Bachman's Unrivaled Extremism:

On Monday, Bachmann didn't talk a lot about her religion. She didn't have to -- she knows how to signal it in ways that go right over secular heads. In criticizing Obama's Libya policy, for example, she said, "We are the head and not the tail." The phrase comes from Deuteronomy 28:13: "The Lord will make you the head and not the tail." As Rachel Tabachnick has reported, it's often used in theocratic circles to explain why Christians have an obligation to rule.

Indeed, no other candidate in the race is so completely a product of the evangelical right as Bachmann; she could easily become the Christian conservative alternative to the comparatively moderate Mormon Mitt Romney. "Michele Bachmann's a complete package," says Ralph Reed, the former Christian Coalition wunderkind who now runs the Faith and Freedom Coalition. "She's got charisma, she's got an authentic faith testimony, she's a proven fighter for conservative values, and she's well known." She's also great at raising money -- in the 2010 cycle, she amassed a record-breaking $13.2 million in donations.

Goldberg recounts the same bio, including pivotal appearances by Francis Schaeffer and John Eidsmore, winding up in politics.

Not that this means anything, but Bachmann did manage to win the Ames Straw Poll, although Ron Paul ran a close second. Rick Perry would have come in sixth on write-in votes, which is more impressive looking at the people below him (Romney, Gingrich, Huntsman) than those above him (Cain, Santorum, Pawlenty). Elsewhere I read that Perry got 99% of the write-in votes, which means that others (like Sarah Palin) could have split no more than 7 votes.

As for 9th place finisher, Thaddeus McCotter, the first I heard of him was when I was researching a record called Mad About Thad (a Thad Jones tribute), and ran across a website called Mad at Thad (McCotter). By the way, I thought John Bolton was running. Has he given up, or is he just batting below the McCotter line?