Bachmann bid is derisive of American voter judgment

You know that feeling you get when you eat too much bad food and it makes your stomach churn like a hurricane? When the ominous cloud of uncertain well-being hangs over your head? I'm not a medical professional, so I'm going to refer to that feeling as "Michele Bachmann" from now on.

During the 2008 presidential elections my biggest fear was Sarah Palin and her unique brand of babbling Tea Party insanity. Even since Barack Obama's presidency began (about which I am fairly apathetic), I've still had nightmares that Ms. Alaska would announce a bid for the presidency and the reason this terrifies me is because I have very little trust in the decision-making capabilities of the American public.

Then the GOP managed to take all the fear I had about Sarah Palin and up the ante with someone even more extreme, which I didn't think was possible: Michele Bachmann.

Dear Mrs. Bachmann: Your ads, which have somehow appeared on my computer screen far too frequently (I guess the Smart Ad algorithms aren't that precise), say that you are a "Constitutional Conservative" and your own website says that you want to make sure our "liberties enshrined in our founding documents are handed down from this generation to the next."

I'm curious then as to why you support amendments that would ban same-sex marriage because I'm not quite able to register the connection between "defending enshrined liberties" and denying liberties to people who you claim suffer from "sexual dysfunctions" or "sexual identity disorders," which you so sympathetically diagnosed at the EdWatch National Education Conference in 2004.

OK, so we started off on the wrong foot. Let's try again?

You support teaching intelligent design in our schools, too? Uh-oh. Although, to be fair, you do say that you support "putting all science on the table and then letting students decide," which certainly makes you sound a lot more balanced. I'm imagining a typical classroom discussion as the following:

"Over extremely large spans of time, from thousands of years to millions of years, small changes in the genetic code of an organism from generation to generation can drastically change the organism or even cause speciation. At the same time, everything came into being in six days and no organism has changed in even the slightest way since it all happened 6,000 years ago."

I know you have strong convictions but pseudoscience is incompatible with respectable 21st-    century education.

I also noticed that you feel that global warming is a hoax. Well that's the end of your lifelines. Don't you know I'm a student of FGCU? The environmental university? Should I believe you or my professors?

Bachmann is entirely representative of an extreme sector of public opinion that throws reason out the window. Palin was at least aloof but Bachmann's got bite. Are there any redeeming factors? Comedic value at least?

It's not even funny. Her bid for the presidency is almost a mockery of our intellectual decency. Let us not be mocked next year.