Good news for Michele Bachmann. If husband Dr. Marcus Bachmann's "pray the gay away" homosexual conversion clinics ever (finally?) go under, she's got a ready made venture waiting in the wings to fund her presidential campaign. She can open a clinic to treat the wounds of reporters like Brian Ross, the ABC News correspondent roughed up by her handlers this week when he tried to ask Bachmann pointed questions about how her headaches have affected her work in Congress.
Think I'm kidding? If this is how Bachmann's campaigners treat journalists every time they annoy the candidate, we're looking at a long line of victims.
Ross was reportedly treated to a Mafia-style bruising when he followed Bachmann as she ignored his questions (he wanted to know if she'd ever missed a House vote because of her headaches, which she says she treats with medicine to stay on the job). The attack came a week after ABC ran a piece featuring Ross taking down Dr. Bachmann's clinic, which he called "fresh insight into what Michele Bachmann has called her family business -- the primary source of income for her family as she left her law practice to move into politics."
Journalists have been thwarted in their attempts to investigate the Christian counseling clinic by Bachmann's claims of doctor/patient confidentiality, but Ross found real patients who were willing to go on record. The result revealed the doctor has lied about the goings on at the clinic, and showed its common practices fly in the face of American Psychological Association directives. In other words: Ross just ripped Michele Bachmann's main funding source to shreds in a national news report. And a week later, he's treated to manhandling the likes of which witness and fellow reporter Michael Crowley of TIME Magazine observed: "I have never seen a reporter treated so roughly at a campaign event, especially not a presidential one."
Touché Michele!
If she's going to proceed with her campaign, Bachmann has to understand that poking through her closet for skeletons is the nature of the beast. She's not running for dog catcher. She wants to be the next president of the United States, and Americans deserve to know what sort of activities she supports and where her money is coming from.
There are going to be a lot more reporters digging up dirt she doesn't like. Is she going to have them all attacked on her behalf, leaving a string of wounded journalists in her wake? Or is she going to start acting like a real candidate?
Image via YouTube