Michele Bachmann held a town hall forum at Lake Elmo that went pretty much the way you would expect it to have gone.

At the opening the attendees were told to recite the Pledge of Allegiance (with the "under God" part, natch, that was added during the McCarthy years), followed by a singer brought in to perform the national anthem. All that was missing was a jet flyover, though the FOX News cameras were indeed there.

The moderator, State Representative Bob Dettmer (R-Forest Lake), then laid out the basic ground rules of the forum, including asking people to leave their signs outside in an apparent effort to keep the more extreme wackos from being documented by the mainstream press, then launched into a four-minute-long introduction/panegyric of Michele Bachmann that was punctuated by applause from her fan base.

At last, the congressmember herself took the stage. She came up, said pretty much what you would expect her to say (boy, did she love the fact that they sang the national anthem beforehand! boy, does she hate the deficit yet love tax cuts! did you know that in England women give birth on the floor?), and the teabagger-dominated crowd applauded her every line. (Yes, Bachmann tried to scare everyone with tales of rationing overseas, even though rationing not only exists here but is in fact the basis of our system — it’s called "underwriting".) Yet when the forum was opened to questions, there were enough reality-based folk around to make a good showing (see the exchange starting around 41:00 here) and even a bit of shouting back and forth. She was even challenged, round about the 59:50 mark, on why she insisted on distorting the president’s health care plans.

But what was probably the highlight of the evening was when LeRoy Schaffer, a member of the city council of St. Francis, a white-flight exurb in Anoka County thirty miles north of Minneapolis, got up to speak. Mr. Schaffer had obviously not received the "don’t act like a crazy teabagger" memo. Not only did he weave back and forth with a swagger that reminded me forcibly of a really drunk and/or nervous Captain Jack Sparrow, he — like Sparrow — was wearing a costume, though to be sure his was relatively restrained: Top hat, black tie, and tails.

Ah, but that was the extent of his restraint. Rocking from side to side and back and forth, Schaffer started in on a loud, angry fact-challenged rant that was the finest display of authentic exurb gibberish I’ve seen outside of Gabby Johnson himself. Here’s my attempt at a transcript:

My name is Emanuel Zapata — figuratively speaking, that is. — What my name is, is LeRoy T. Schaffer. I’m a city councilman from St. Francis, so I’m sort of in a way, in a very small way, an insider. And I’ll tell ya, she’s right — we got the best health care in the world! THE VERY BEST!

Markfromireland and the JAMA beg to differ on that last point, sir.

There follows a short stretch of unintelligible ranting interspersed with pauses for effect, and then this, delivered angrily of course and received with loud cheers:

I’ll be danged if I am going to give up my Social Security because of socialism, and I’ll be danged if I am going to give up my Medicare because of socialism!

Um, sir? Didn’t you know that your party considers both Social Security and Medicare to be socialism, and has from the start?

That was about as coherent as he got. From there it degenerated into word salad about pools and the Fortune 500 and dog knows what else what on his mind.

Mr. Schaffer is known for this sort of thing. Last December he barely defeated an attempt to recall him after he made some "inappropriate sexual remarks" to a younger woman at a social event, and was so freaked out about a crew of Spanish-speaking roofers that he called the cops on them without them having actually done anything wrong. This is what the Republican Party of Minnesota looks like, folks. And sounds like. Eeeeek.