Sarah Palin, left, and Michele Bachmann, right. You decide which is the crazier of the two, because I sure as hell can't decide...
Sure, all politicians lie—it’s just part of the game. But none of them lie like Republican Michele Bachmann, the House Representative from Minnesotta who is the leader of the tea party caucus. Former Minn. state Senator Dean Johnson, who was the Republican minority leader during Bachmann’s stint in St. Paul, has said, “I don’t think I ever served with anybody who I mistrusted more, from either side of the aisle.” Those are pretty strong words from a politician who is in fact in the same party as Michele. PolitiFact‘s Bill Adair recently told Minnesota Public Radio that he has never researched a Bachmann quote and found it to be true.
And in case you haven’t heard, Bachmann slyly announced her candidacy for President last night in a New Hampshire GOP debate. The scariest part about her entering a race that isn’t even a race yet because we’re still about a year and a half away from the election is that she believes her lies and never corrects them or apologizes for them once they are exposed as lies. And it’s not just lies either, it’s also falsehoods and total misunderstandings similar to those like Sarah Palin usually spews out. Here’s some of Bachmann’ greatest hits, put together by Mother Jones. After reading them I’m unsure as to whether her or Palin is the leader of the humanrobots. Expect more and more flat out crazy comments and lies like these to come in the following year and a half because she’s fit for a straitjacket…
2003: Bachmann, then a state senator, explains why she doesn’t agree with the theory of evolution: “Where do we say that a cell became a blade of grass, which became a starfish, which became a cat, which became a donkey, which became a human being? There’s a real lack of evidence from change from actual species to a different type of species. That’s where it’s difficult to prove.”
2005: Bachmann explains her opposition to the state’s minimum wage as a form of job creation: “Literally, if we took away the minimum wage—if conceivably it was gone—we could potentially virtually wipe out unemployment completely because we would be able to offer jobs at whatever level.”
2009: As the nation (aided, perhaps, by Vice President Joe Biden) freaks out over Swine Flu, Bachmann implies—while stressing that she isn’t—that this whole thing might have been Obama’s doing: “I find it interesting that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat president, Jimmy Carter. And I’m not blaming this on President Obama, I just think it’s an interesting coincidence.”
2009: Bachmann warns the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. health care reform) would include a loophole permitting grade-schoolers to go on abortion field trips: “Does that mean that someone’s 13-year old daughter could walk into a sex clinic, have a pregnancy test done, be taken away to the local Planned Parenthood abortion clinic, have their abortion, be back, and go home on the school bus that night? Mom and dad are never the wiser. They don’t know any different.”
2009: Bachmann argues that abnormally large emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide can’t be regulated because if we did, birds would lose their natural habitat—air: “Life on planet Earth can’t even exist without carbon dioxide. So necessary is it to human life, to animal life, to plant life, to the oceans, to the vegetation that’s on the Earth, to the, to the fowl that—that flies in the air, we need to have carbon dioxide as part of the fundamental lifecycle of Earth.”
2010: After former President Bill Clinton tells reporters Bachmann’s “armed and dangerous” remarks could send the wrong message to fringe groups, Bachmann accuses Clinton of celebrating the Oklahoma City Bombings—by speaking at an event honoring those who died in the attack. “He gave a speech, and he called me out in his speech, and he was talking about the anniversary—now, only Democrats would do this. The anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing by Tim McVeigh. I mean, we don’t celebrate these things. This is not what we celebrate.”
2010: Redundant Redundancies, vol. II: “That’s what the Bill of Rights is all about—to secure our individual liberties from an overweening huge bureaucratic large big government.”
2011: Bachmann suggests an unlikely fix to the nation’s long-term deficit: “I think if we give Glenn Beck the numbers, he can solve this.”
2011: On Twitter, Bachmann says the President’s proposal to make government-subsidized lunches more nutritional violates the will of the Founders: “Where in the #Constitution does it say the fed. government should regulate potatoes in school lunches? It doesn’t.” Which is true. Technically.
Ryan Brower 