Michele Bachmann’s “Iron” Deficiency

Last summer, Margaret Thatcher snubbed Sarah Palin, turning down a visit from the Tea Party darling because (in the words of someone in Thatcher’s camp) “That would be belittling for Margaret. Sarah Palin is nuts.” If that was really how Thatcher thought of Palin, imagine the low regard she’d have for Michele Bachmann.

That’s not stopping Bachmann from comparing herself to Thatcher in a new ad (embedded above), one that capitalizes on the buzz surrounding Meryl Streep’s Oscar-worthy performance as Thatcher in the new biopic The Iron Lady. Now, it’s often problematic when conservatives try to tap into pop culture and align themselves with current hit movies.* (Remember over the summer when Republicans in Congress psyched themselves up for the debt ceiling fight by watching a clip of thuggish behavior from The Town? Was that really the image these fiscally responsible Republicans wanted to convey, that of violent bank robbers from a movie made by prominent Democratic supporter Ben Affleck?) How tone-deaf is it for Bachmann to associate herself not with the real Thatcher but with the movie Thatcher, played by one of Hollywood’s prominent liberals, in a film that British conservative politicians have criticized as an unflattering smear of Thatcher?

Imagine No Self-Righteous Outrage

Is this really a thing? Outrage over Cee-Lo Green changing one lyric in John Lennon’s “Imagine” during his New Year’s Eve performance? Granted, Cee-Lo became superfamous for singing altered lyrics to his own famously profane hit song, but we’re supposed to be surprised that he displays similar irreverence toward someone else’s work?

Fine, so he changed the lyric, “And no religion, too” to “And all religion’s true.” (The offending alteration comes in at around the five-minute mark in the video embedded above.) But if you think about it, that line is just as provocative as the line it replaces. If all religion is true, then neither Muslims nor Christians nor Jews nor Buddhists can claim a monopoly on religious truth. (And then, I guess, we should all become Unitarian Universalists.) It’s a provocative change, provocative in a good way, like the rest of the song, and I suspect that that venerable provocateur, John Lennon, might have approved of the tweak, since he considered so little to be sacred, including his own musical canon (“I don’t believe in Beatles,” as he put it).