What next in politics?

Looks like the Apocalypse to me.

Former Rep. Michele Bachmann is very excited that the world may be coming to an end. Iran may be getting the bomb, and gay people are getting married these days, and all of this is wonderful news because it means Israel is going to be destroyed and there will be wars and plagues and famines and that means Jesus is going to come back to fly all the bestest Bachmann-approving-of Christians into heaven while her enemies get left to rot in whatever post-nuclear wasteland comes next. You think we are making this up. We are not making this up.

“We get to be living in the most exciting time in history,” she said, urging fellow Christians to “rejoice.””Jesus Christ is coming back. We, in our lifetimes potentially, could see Jesus Christ returning to Earth, the Rapture of the Church.”

It should be noted that yes, Michele Bachmann was until very recently a prominent member of Congress and is a special darling of the conservative right. It should also be noted her views on these matters bear more than a passing similarity to a Jim Jones or a David Koresh, though Bachmann considers the whole of the nation to be members of her delusional death cult.

“We need to realize how close this clock is to getting towards the midnight hour,”Bachmann said. “Barack Obama is intent, it is his number one goal, to ensure that Iran has a nuclear weapon.” […]After Bachmann said that Obama intends to “lift up the agenda of radical Islam,” Markell added that legal abortion and marriage equality for gays and lesbians are bringing about divine punishment on America.

“You are right,” Bachmann responded, lamenting that God will soon lift His “hedge of protection” over “pagan” America “and we will suffer the consequences as a result.”

That prominent members of one of our two national parties firmly believe Israel must be destroyed to bring about the second coming of Jesus Christ, and get genuinely excited by anything they see as potentially advancing this agenda, tends not to get much attention because it simply sounds too implausible to be real. We in America do not like to think of ourselves as being led by religious zealots who consider themselves harbingers of the end of the world; that sounds like other countries, perhaps, but not us. We are enlightened and rational people. We launch satellites, and have iPhones.But it is real. Put a microphone in front of them and a cup of tea in one hand and they will tell you so. And the Michele Bachmanns of the party are so popular and so sought-out, in what we are now calling the tea party crowd, not in spite of their delusions of religious grandeur or conspiratorial visions of what their perceived opponents are plotting or how it ties into God’s plan for torturing or killing every last human on Earth that ever treated them badly, but because of those beliefs. It makes them Godly. Believing the president of the United States is a secret Muslim proves that the believer is Pure. Loving the Jews is a requirement rooted not in basic human decency but is a necessary price for a ticket to ride the sky-train, when the sky-train toots its heavenly horn and arrives at the platform, Jesus Himself conducting, on the eve of everything else going straight to Hell.

It is flagrantly obvious that the people most convinced that Iran is an irrational theocratic state whose leaders see themselves as religious prophets destined to destroy their enemies and elevate their own religion into global dominance over all others are leaders who consider themselves to be—precisely that. That Michele Bachmann thinks these things is not unusual. That Michele Bachmann could receive adulation among wide swaths of “the base” for her courage in saying such things should, however, cause all the rest of us to wet our pants in fear for the nation. We are a nation in which a great many people believe in their hearts that gay people getting rights are directly responsible for individual tornadoes, and that we will never run out of oil because God simply would not allow something that terrible to happen, and that the modern state of Israel holds value almost exclusively as a chip to be cashed when the time comes, a blood sacrifice to be made that will grant the offerers eternal salvation. This is not exaggeration. We are not making this shit up.