How The Left-Wing Media Creates Memes About GOP Candidates: A Bachmann Based “John Wayne” Case Study

How The Left-Wing Media Creates Memes About GOP Candidates: A Bachmann Based “John Wayne” Case Study

So, Michelle Bachmann is in Waterloo, Iowa and she says this:

Rep. Michele Bachmann kicked off her presidential campaign on Monday in Waterloo, Iowa, and in one interview surrounding the official event she promised to mimic the spirit of Waterloo’s own John Wayne.

The only problem, as one eagle-eyed reader notes: Waterloo’s John Wayne was not the beloved movie star, but rather John Wayne Gacy, the serial killer.

Mrs. Bachmann grew up in Waterloo, and used the town as the backdrop for her campaign announcement, where she told Fox News: “Well what I want them to know is just like, John Wayne was from Waterloo, Iowa. That’s the kind of spirit that I have, too.”

O.M.G. Is Bachmann saluting serial killer John Wayne Gacy? Oh, she must be crazy! Huge gaffe! How can she be so stupid! And extreme! Wow, unbelievable!

Except…

The Bachmann campaign sent this explanation: “John Wayne is from Iowa, his parents lived in Waterloo.”

And indeed his parents did in fact live briefly in Waterloo – in fact, according to “Duke: The Life and Image of John Wayne,” it’s where they met. But soon after their marriage they moved to Winterset, where Wayne was born.

In other words, on the old gaffe-o-meter scale, this is actually about a 0.5 out of 10. John Wayne’s parents lived in Waterloo, but they had John Wayne three hours away.

If Obama made a mistake this insignificant, it probably wouldn’t make it into the news at all. If it did, it would be mentioned as a minor correction 2/3 of the way through. But, Bachmann is a conservative running for President and the Left has a standard template for all viable presidential candidates (besides racist, evil, and the other trite stuff): Stupid or crazy.

Think about it.

Nixon? Crazy.
Ford? Stupid.
Ronald Reagan? Stupid and crazy.
George H.W. Bush: Stupid
Dan Quayle? Stupid.
Bob Dole? Crazy.
George W. Bush? Stupid.

So, if Obama says there are 57 states it would be evidence of…nothing. Because he’s a Democrat and thus, can’t be stupid. Only Republicans can be stupid. If Bachmann had said it, however, it would be eternally repeated as dead-bang evidence that she’s way too dumb to be President because she’s a Republican and thus, can be stupid enough to believe there are 57 states.

Lefties will do this over and over and over until they create a meme and eventually people go, “Gee, there sure have been a lot of stories that make Bachmann sound crazy. I mean, none of them seemed to have any real ‘there, there,’ but there were so many of them. So, if there’s that much smoke, there must be fire.”

Put another way, the lefties decide what image they want to project and then they turn mountains into molehills, even if they have to leave out facts to do it, until they’ve created a body of evidence to support the image they had before they started.

It doesn’t take a conspiracy to do this: After all, since every viable Republican candidate is going to be portrayed as stupid or crazy, any dishonest liberal hack can figure out how to slant the story.

This is how it works in the real world.

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