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Saturday, July 30, 2011

Pray Away The ... Significant Holes In The Credibility of the Bachmanns

Can you imagine the dinner table conversations at the home of "counselor" Marcus and "presidential candidate" Michele Bachmann? "So, did you pray away the gay today, dear?" "No, I'm still ... I mean we're working on a couple of young men right now. Did you do anything interesting?" "Well, I voted against a bill to raise the debt ceiling." "You didn't touch Medicaid did you dear? We, I mean, I get a lot of money from Medicaid."
[First, a disclaimer, to all those suddenly women's libbers out there who see any attack on the lack of credibility of the Congresswoman from Minnesota as an attack on her because of her gender: It's not because she has boobs, it's because she is one. (Thanks again, Bill Maher!)
Marcus Bachmann is not licensed in the state of Minnesota - or any other - as a therapist. He in fact does practice "pray away the gay" and purchased his PhD from a "college" in Ohio. But his wife is crazy and he hasn't been able to stabilize her, so how good of a "therapist" is he?
In a January 2011 article on minnesota.publicradio.org, Tom Scheck quoted the Pulitzer Prize-winning

feature of the St. Petersburg Times PolitiFact: "We have checked her 13 times, and seven of her claims have been found to be false and six have been found to be ridiculously false," PolitiFact editor Bill Adair said. He added that no other politician has been checked as often as Bachmann without saying anything truthful: "I don't know anyone else that we have checked, more than a couple times, that has never earned anything above a false. She is unusual in that regard in that she has never gotten a rating higher than false."And that she has a penchant for repeating claims initially made on blogs or in chain mails. Wonder how much money she's lost helping African princes bring their money to America?

Among the many issues she either doesn't understand or flat-out lies about (and there's not a third kind), there's Medicaid, the means-tested, joint federal and state funded medical coverage program. When Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton signed a bill enrolling his state early in the federal extension of the program, Bachmann went ballistic. Despite the fact that for 7 1/2 years, she and her "counselor" husband took in 23 foster kids - who automatically qualify for Medicaid - she opposed expansion of the program. Probably because her license had expired. Oh, and her statements about "raising" foster kids? 
"Their family was facing a challenge and they weren't going to be able to be at home with their parents and so we took them in as teenagers," Bachmann said. "And our job was to see that they graduated from high school and were successfully launched into the world." Their license allowed for the care of three children at a time, typically, normally for a few months only.
Her misstatements reflect her lack of intelligence. Maybe all that snow in Minnesota has given her "cabin fever" and it went to her brain. Here's a few more:
1) "We know that within just a day or so that the President of the United States is taking a trip to India that is expected to cost the taxpayers $200 million a day." (2010)
2) "Iran is the troublemaker, trying to tip over apple carts all over Baghdad right now because they want America to pull out and you know why? It's because they've already decided that they're going to partition Iraq," (2007)
3) "Under President Obama, we bought a bureaucracy that now tells us which light bulbs to buy."(2011) Bachmann was a member of Congress when fellow Republican Fred Upton created the bill and Shrub signed it into law.
4) This is my favorite: ''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.''
See how easy this is? You can't swing a dead cat without hitting an incorrect, false, untrue or flat-out lying statement. It's humorous when these statements are followed by "said the Minnesota Congresswoman," or "Bachmann said" or even "the Tea Party darling stated." The thought that someday "I'm being held captive in a ladies room" would be followed by, "said the President?" I don't think anybody REALLY wants that.

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