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The Michele Bachmann Newsweek Cover Controversy

By Robert Paul Reyes

Michele Bachmann is very pleasing to the eye, and a photographer doesn't have to resort to digital manipulation to make her look good.

I don't mean to imply that physical attractiveness is Bachmann's most outstanding virtue, she's intelligent, well spoken and dedicated to her right-wing ideology.

But there's a touch of madness about Michele Bachmann, it's in the intensity of her gaze and in her sometimes incoherent rhetoric. The now infamous Newsweek cover aptly captures the Michele psychosis, the conservative firebrand is staring into the distance at a grand vision only she can see.

Conservative bloggers and pundits have their panties in a twist, they claim that Newsweek deliberately selected a photo that made their heroine appear stark raving bonkers.

We must keep in mind that Bachmann posed for this pic, the photographer didn't whisper: Give us your best insane look.

Of course Newsweek chose a photograph that makes the Tea Party favorite look like she's unhinged! Duh, the photo is captioned: The Queen of Rage! The implication is that Newsweek is sexist; I don't think the magazine's head honcho, Tina Brown, has a sexist bone in her body.

The media in general certainly isn't sexist, Howard Dean was depicted as a raving lunatic after his infamous war cry. Dean's Scream effectively ended his 2004 presidential campaign, he never recovered from the media's portrayal of him as a madman.

If Bachmann's public persona didn't border on paranoia, her unflattering Newsweek photograph wouldn't have been more than a blip in the political landscape.

Mothers may use the Newsweek image of Bachmann to get their young children to go to bed on time, because there's something frightening, very frightening, about the Tea Party darling.

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Robert Paul Reyes is a NewsBlaze writer on Politics, Pop Culture and Pointless Pontificating. Contact him by writing to NewsBlaze.