Bachmann Defies Expectations, Fights Off Establishment Boy Club Hits

Oh yeah, let's smear Michele Bachmann, she suffers from headaches, I have a headache dear, how throwing the china, lipstick on a pig--let's marginalize women candidates so we establishment good old boys can keep running things.

She's rising in the polls, and she has a new ad out in Iowa: P.S. Establishment consigliere Karl Rove was on this morning suggesting she should release her medical records. Brian Ross goes on The View. Jim Geraghty skeptical in Morning Jolt:

Here’s the first problem with the claims in this story. We have all seen Bachmann on cable television so frequently and ubiquitously that it’s easy to wonder if she bunks on the cable networks’ green-room couches. No one’s ever made much of an issue about Bachmann missing votes (she’s missed 5 percent of the House floor votes in her lifetime, spiking at times, but at the chamber’s median for most of her career) or having long unexplained absences in her Congressional duties. So if she were indeed having once-a-week “episodes” that “incapacitated” her for days, she wouldn’t have been able to maintain the public life that she has. The article mentions hospitalization on “three occasions,” but doesn’t give a time frame; I see references to July 2010 and then a May 2010 “episode” that had her going to an “urgent care center” before continuing on to “several events in California.”

Read on.

NY Times pile on, Politico, naturally. More buzz at Memeorandum here, here.

More. Another attack, based on this theme. You know, Bachmann's doing well in national polls.