Michele Bachmann's greatest hits: A guide to her most outrageous, outlandish, and out-there remarks

Michele Bachmann Said What!?

Mother Jones
By Tim Murphy | Mon Jun. 6, 2011 3:00 AM PDT

[snip]

Now in just her third term in Congress, Michele Bachmann, the leader of the House tea party caucus, has earned a reputation as one of the lower chamber's leading bomb-throwers, lobbing overheated rhetoric at Democrats and needling establishment Republicans. Her Minnesota colleague, Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison once accused her of "psycho talk"; in an interview with Politico, a Pawlenty aide was just as blunt: "She's a real pain in the ass." Former 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."

Ouch. Bachmann also has a tendency to stretch the truth, or simply sidestep it altogether. Bill Adair, editor of PolitiFact, recently told Minnesota Public Radio that he has never researched a Bachmann quote and found it to be true (the only major politician for which that's the case).

Here's an incomplete guide to Bachmann's greatest hits...

(Continued here.)

Michele Bachmann wants to lead us all to salvation (well, most of us anyway)

Michele Bachmann, hell's Barbie

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Meanwhile, while you were sleeping, while you were allowing your attention to wander to issues more pressing, heartwarming and good, such as gay New Yorkers in love and goofy dogs running marathons, easily the most insane and wide-eyed squirrelmonkey pseudo-politician in your lifetime announced that she is hereby running for president of the United States.

And by "running" she does not mean putting on those supercute little silver jogging shoes with the funny blinky LED lights in the heels that she saw at DSW that one time, because that would be silly and not make any sense at all, and she wants people to understand she is very serious about this campaign thing and is definitely not as totally loopy bats--t crazy as your demented Aunt Sylvia with the twitchy eye, 23 parakeets and the addiction to little tubes of Oscar Meyer bologna wrapped around a fistful of oxycodone.

Except, of course, that she totally is.

Yes, Michele Bachmann is running for president. Michele Bachmann, fundamentalist Christian zealot, paranoid isolationist, lowbrow conspiracy theorist, heavily shellacked automaton, anti-choice anti-gay anti-everything neo-Stepford throwback and easily the flat-out nuttiest female ever to raise a hugely depressing $13 million for her clumsy campaign launch, Michele wants to lead us all to salvation.

(More here.)

Michele Bachmann's Holy War

The Tea Party contender may seem like a goofball, but be warned: Her presidential campaign is no laughing matter

Matt Taibbi
RollingStone

Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and, as you consider the career and future presidential prospects of an incredible American phenomenon named Michele Bachmann, do one more thing. Don't laugh.

It may be the hardest thing you ever do, for Michele Bachmann is almost certainly the funniest thing that has ever happened to American presidential politics. Fans of obscure 1970s television may remember a short-lived children's show called "Far Out Space Nuts", in which a pair of dimwitted NASA repairmen, one of whom is played by Bob (Gilligan) Denver, accidentally send themselves into space by pressing "launch" instead of "lunch" inside a capsule they were fixing at Cape Canaveral. This plot device roughly approximates the political and cultural mechanism that is sending Michele Bachmann hurtling in the direction of the Oval Office.

Bachmann is a religious zealot whose brain is a raging electrical storm of divine visions and paranoid delusions. She believes that the Chinese are plotting to replace the dollar bill, that light bulbs are killing our dogs and cats, and that God personally chose her to become both an IRS attorney who would spend years hounding taxpayers and a raging anti-tax Tea Party crusader against big government. She kicked off her unofficial presidential campaign in New Hampshire, by mistakenly declaring it the birthplace of the American Revolution. "It's your state that fired the shot that was heard around the world!" she gushed. "You are the state of Lexington and Concord, you started the battle for liberty right here in your backyard."

I said lunch, not launch! But don't laugh. Don't do it. And don't look her in the eyes; don't let her smile at you. Michele Bachmann, when she turns her head toward the cameras and brandishes her pearls and her ageless, unblemished neckline and her perfect suburban orthodontics in an attempt to reassure the unbeliever of her non-threateningness, is one of the scariest sights in the entire American cultural tableau. She's trying to look like June Cleaver, but she actually looks like the T2 skeleton posing for a passport photo. You will want to laugh, but don't, because the secret of Bachmann's success is that every time you laugh at her, she gets stronger.

(More here.)

'Hypocrisy in Government 101' by Rep. Michele Bachmann

Michele Bachmann uses freedom of the (taxpayer-paid) press to promote herself

By Karl Bremer, Minnesota Monitor
March 27, 2008

On Michele Bachmann’s congressional website, she pledges to uphold the “American Taxpayers Bill of Rights”, which calls on House conservatives to “Restore fiscal discipline and find innovative new ways to do MORE with LESS … If families in America can tighten their belts, so too can bureaucrats in Washington.”

But when it comes to Bachmann’s self-promotion at taxpayer expense, there’s no fiscal dieting to be found. An examination of congressional mailing expenditures from the first six months of 2007 shows Bachmann to be the runaway big spender in the Minnesota delegation, doing LESS with MORE tax dollars to promote herself.

Bachmann’s oversized four-color glossy mailings have been the subject of much debate in the 6th District. Most recently, a Stearns County constituent questioned the expenditures for Bachmann’s puffery in a St. Cloud Times editorial. Not surprisingly, Bachmann’s office has not been forthcoming with an explanation of the costs.

(More here.)