Pictured: a bunch of lucky duckies escape the cruelty of Africa.

From Ryan Lizza’s must-read Bachmann profile in the New Yorker.

While looking over Bachmann’s State Senate campaign Web site, I stumbled upon a list of book recommendations. The third book on the list, which appeared just before the Declaration of Independence and George Washington’s Farewell Address, is a 1997 biography of Robert E. Lee by J. Steven Wilkins.

Wilkins is the leading proponent of the theory that the South was an orthodox Christian nation unjustly attacked by the godless North. This revisionist take on the Civil War, known as the “theological war” thesis, had little resonance outside a small group of Southern historians until the mid-twentieth century, when Rushdoony and others began to popularize it in evangelical circles. In the book, Wilkins condemns “the radical abolitionists of New England” and writes that “most southerners strove to treat their slaves with respect and provide them with a sufficiency of goods for a comfortable, though—by modern standards—spare existence.”

African slaves brought to America, he argues, were essentially lucky: “Africa, like any other pagan country, was permeated by the cruelty and barbarism typical of unbelieving cultures.” [...]

In his chapter on race relations in the antebellum South, Wilkins writes: “Slavery, as it operated in the pervasively Christian society which was the old South, was not an adversarial relationship founded upon racial animosity.”

This book was on her website for three years under “Michele’s Must Read List.” The author, J. Steven Wilkins, was a board member of the League of the South, a Neo-Confederate hate group.

Just more proof that this woman is cuckoo-for-cocoa-puffs crazy, and the fact that she’s giving Willard a run for his money tells you everything you need to know about the state of the Republican Party.