Christopher Hitchens in Slate riffs on Michele Bachmann’s John Wayne (Gacy) gaffe and wonders if, because of that and other things, she might be headed for trouble; her Waterloo, as it were.
He also manages to get that other John Wayne namesake — Bobbitt — into the rambling item, noting that he’s long felt that:
“…having ‘John Wayne’ in your lineup of given names is a bad predictor: John Wayne Bobbitt was reduced by an infuriated partner to hunting in the weeds for his abruptly severed penis.”
He thinks Bachmann’s campaign has problems:
“Traditionally, the phrase ‘to meet your Waterloo’ means to encounter a final and unarguable defeat. Perhaps it’s too early to say that, but really. In one stroke, Bachmann shows that she can’t tell one folksy Iowa town from another. Then she compounds the error by confusing a folk hero with a villain and psycho. Finally, and having never done or said anything that would stand a second’s comparison to the spirit of The Duke (whatever you may think of him), she tries to borrow the mantle of a husky gunfighter in the very week that she is pathetically advocating that we leave Col. Qaddafi alone. The old parochialism meets the not-so-new isolationism. A very shaky start.”
He really doesn’t like that idea of leaving Qaddafi alone:
“For Bachmann to choose this moment to say that the loony of Libya poses no threat is to disqualify herself from any consideration for high office. She evidently knows nothing about the four decades of dictatorship and depredation that have led up to this. But then, when you come to notice it, she doesn’t seem to know her Iowan derrière from an artesian well, either.”
