Perry Leads Bachmann For Political Darwin Award

In a stunning political reversal, Texas Governor Rick Perry has displaced Minnesota Rep. Michelle “Bat Shit Crazy” Bachmann as the top candidate for this year’s coveted political Darwin Award.

In the wake of Governor Perry’s threats last year to secede from the Union over the issue of receiving federal stimulus funds, Texas is lagging way behind the national average in census returns, with potentially significant harm to the state at both the state and national levels.  According to The Huston Chronicle:

Officials worry low response rate is a form of protest

By RICHARD S. DUNHAM and MEREDITH SIMONS
WASHINGTON BUREAU
March 27, 2010, 7:51AM

WASHINGTON — Texas is counting on the 2010 Census to deliver four new congressional districts, four new Electoral College votes in presidential elections, and millions of dollars in additional federal aid. But, as some elected officials are starting to worry, Uncle Sam can’t deliver anything to the rapidly growing Sun Belt state unless Texas residents deliver their forms back to the government.

As of Friday afternoon, only 27 percent of Texas households had filled in and returned their census forms — well below the national average of 34 percent — according to computer data from the U.S. Census Bureau. In Harris County, the response rate is 23 percent. Houston’s returns are running at 21 percent.

Contrary to historical trends, some of the toughest challenges facing the agency responsible for measuring the nation’s population are not from counting the traditionally undercounted groups such as African-Americans and Latinos. Instead, a new and growing threat to an accurate national head count is coming from anti-government conservatives who may not fill out their forms to protest against “Big Brother” in Washington.

Bachmann, who last year promised to lead a boycott against filling out the constitutionally mandated census form, warned that the census was just the first step in setting up WW II Japanese internment camps:

Bachmann: Take this into consideration. If we look at American history, between 1942 and 1947, the data that was collected by the census bureau was handed over to the FBI and other organizations, at the request of President Roosevelt, and that’s how the Japanese were rounded up and put into the internment camps. I’m not saying that’s what the Administration is planning to do. But I am saying that private, personal information that was given to the census bureau in the 1940s was used against Americans to round them up and put the Japanese in internment camps.

Bachmann, who has said she likes Minnesotans “armed and dangerous,”  revealed that the Obama Administration planned to use legions of evil Acorn workers going door to door to compile the data for the census bureau, pointing out that if was they who were responsible for former Senator Norm Coleman‘s loss to Al Franken in the 2008 Minnesota senate race.

According to calculations using the census office’s interactive charting map, Michelle Bachmann’s 6th district, which comprises six counties, is, as of today, reporting an average 47% response rate. (Results for two of those counties, Sherburne and Anoka, can be found here.)

Political handicappers believe Bachmann has hurt her chances to win a Darwin because of her noticeable lack of boycott activity of late. They speculate that her basic survival instinct overrode her usual craziness when someone pointed out that Minnesota could actually lose a congressional seat, hers, if its population went undercounted.

No word yet from how criminal psychopath Hannibal Lector feels about being replaced in the cultural zeitgeist by Ms. Bachmann as the nation’s number one census scourge. Lector, who once bragged that he ate a census worker’s liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti, couldn’t be reached for comment, saying he was having an old friend for dinner.