WATERLOO, Iowa -- Conservative Republican Michele Bachmann appeared this weekend in her hometown of Waterloo, Iowa, to kick off her official run at the 2012 presidential race. Bachmann had hoped to reestablish her credentials as a true native of Iowa, a strategically influential state for politicians seeking the nation’s highest office. However, Bachmann set a dark tone for her campaign when she boasted of sharing a kindred spirit with one of the city’s most infamous residents, serial killer John Wayne Gacy: “Well what I want them to know is just, like John Wayne was from Waterloo, Iowa. That’s the kind of spirit that I have, too.”

Killer Clown John Wayne Gacy
John Wayne Gacy was an American serial killer who became known as the “Killer Clown.” During his life in Waterloo, Gacy raped, sodomized and murdered 33 teenage boys and young men over a six-year period. Twenty-six of Gacy’s victims were buried in the crawlspace of his home, with three others found elsewhere on his property. The bodies of four additional victims were discovered discarded in a nearby river.

Gacy often gained access to his victims by appearing at charitable services, fundraising events, parades and children’s parties dressed as “Pogo the Clown,” a character of his own invention.

Waterloo Spurs Another Dangerous Clown
The parallels between Bachmann and her hometown soul-mate, Gacy, offer a chilling glimpse of life in America under a Bachmann presidency.

Ferrel Michaels, a pundit based in Maryland, called the similarities eerie: “Here we have two powerfully conservative, aggressive and remorseless personalities from the same Midwestern town. Both dedicated to community events, charities and fundraising. Both widely referred to as clowns. Gacy dressed up as one, and Bachmann’s campaign was described as the ‘2012 GOP clown show.’ Both surrounded themselves with scores of kids from other families. Gacy took in 33 young people. Bachmann took in 23. That’s weird, right?”

Michaels also noted Gacy’s involvement in politics, having been honored as the “most outstanding vice president of the Waterloo Jaycees” in 1967.

“I really think we need to take this seriously. If we look at the atrocities of Waterloo’s most notorious citizen, we end up facing the portrait of a frightening nihilist with a fatalistic world view,” Michaels continued. “A respected business person who hid behind a facade of ridiculous makeup, promising the area’s youth that they could get ahead by participating in bizarre social experiments that were purported to promote their self interests and economic gain, but which in fact compromised their health, education, civil liberties, and environment. Like Hansel and Gretel, these children were lured into a house of candy -- into abandoning reason for a faith that promised something for nothing. And in the end, so many naive, inexperienced Americans were duped, abused and raped. Figuratively speaking, it wasn’t much different than what John Wayne Gacy did.”

(c) 2011. All stories are works of satire and parody.