Michele Bachmann's a mama grizzly to Newsweek

Maybe Christine O'Donnell can teach Michele Bachmann a little witchcraft.

Newsweek has decided that Minnesota's Crazy Congresswoman Michele Bachmann is on a par with Sarah Palin, Christine O'Donnell and Nikki Haley when it comes to red-jacket wearing, right-wing loons.

Makes sense, since she crowned herself the Queen of the Tea Party in the House of Representatives.

But even though Newsweek put the four ladies on its cover this week, none of them actually deigned to speak with the magazine.

They don't have to.

Bachmann generally prefers to get her message out from within the friendly confines of Sean Hannity's Fox gabfest, whose fair and balanced approach includes thousands of dollars in donations to Bachmann's political action committee.

Palin toys with a presidential run while also hauling down a paycheck as a Fox News contributor and showing off her need for remedial English on Twitter.

O'Donnell, running for the Senate in Delaware, cut herself off from the national media when her goofball comments about masturbation, witchcraft, and ratting out Anne Frank to Hitler started circulating on the internets.

And Haley is so far ahead in he South Carolina race that she doesn't really need to make nice with anyone, including the movers and shakers within her own party.

It's too bad they didn't sit for interviews, leaving writer Lisa Miller to pick over Palin's "Mama Grizzly" phenomenon by going through the news clips to check into their "mama" bona fides. The story turns out to be less of a hit job than liberal media conspiracy theorists might expect, at least when it comes to Bachmann. For example:

Bachmann lives out her pro-life views convincingly. Over the years she has cared for 23 foster children--in addition to five of her own. ... As a state legislator, Bachmann pushed for anti--abortion initiatives, such as the 2005 Positive Alternatives Act, which has provided some $2.4 million in state Department of Health grants to programs that encourage and assist women in carrying their pregnancies to term and caring for their babies.

But in the end, Miller's not impressed with any of them:

It's mostly a marketing tool, meant to draw attention to Americans' broad dissatisfaction with the way things are. Fair enough. Many people are dissatisfied, and they want to vent and they want to change Washington. But in the wild, real mama grizzlies are known to be aggressive, irrational, and mean. The issues facing the country are complex, and bears are not.

She has voted against funding early--childhood education, student--retention measures, and school modernization.

Read the whole report at Newsweek here.