Michele Bachmann – "batshit crazy"?

Partly extracted from collection by Daniel Kurtzman, and another compiled by Rolling Stone magazine. Why did this person initially gain the lead in the USA 2012 Republican primary?

We cannot resist repeating what Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi wrote about Michele Bachmann:

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."

    Bachmann's story, to hear her tell it, is about a suburban homemaker who is chosen by God to become a politician who will restore faith and family values to public life and do battle with secular humanism. But by the time you've finished reviewing her record of lies and embellishments and contradictions, you'll have no idea if she actually believes in her own divine inspiration, or whether it's a big con job. Or maybe both are true – in which case this hard-charging challenger for the GOP nomination is a rare breed of political psychopath, equal parts crazed Divine Wind kamikaze-for-Jesus and calculating, six-faced Machiavellian prevaricator. Whatever she is, she's no joke.

Here is a collection of Bachmann quotes:

1."I don't know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We've had an earthquake; we've had a hurricane. He said, 'Are you going to start listening to me here?' Listen to the American people because the American people are roaring right now. They know government is on a morbid obesity diet and we've got to rein in the spending." –Rep. Michele Bachmann, suggesting at a presidential campaign event in Florida that the 2011 East Coast earthquake and hurricane was a message from God (Aug. 2011)

2. "I will tell you that I had a mother last night come up to me here in Tampa, Florida, after the debate. She told me that her little daughter took that vaccine, that injection, and she suffered from mental retardation thereafter." –Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), on the HPV vaccine, Fox News interview, 12 Sept. 2011

3. "Why should I go and do something like that? But the Lord says, 'Be submissive wives; you are to be submissive to your husbands." -Rep. Michele Bachmann, recalling in a 2006 speech at a Megachurch in Minneapolis that pursuing tax law wasn't her choice, but she did so at the urging of her husband because she was certain God was speaking through him

4. "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." -Rep. Michele Bachmann (28 April 2009), on the 1976 Swine Flu outbreak that actually happened when Gerald Ford, a Republican, was president.

5. "Carbon dioxide is portrayed as harmful. But there isn't even one study that can be produced that shows that carbon dioxide is a harmful gas." -Rep. Michelle Bachmann, 22 April ["Earth day"] 2009. She elaborated (calling against any attempts to regulate CO2 as a greenhouse gas): "Carbon dioxide, Mister Speaker, is a natural byproduct of nature... It occurs in Earth. ... 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."

6. "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." -Michele Bachmann, Jan. 2005

7. "The events in Benghazi have proved that the United States remains under attack, both in the Middle East, and here in the United States" (4 Nov.2012). Bachmann had sent letters to the inspectors general various US security agencies warning that they may have been infiltrated by Muslim Brotherhood agents. "I certainly do stand by those letters." When the debate moderator noted that there's no proof that the Muslim Brotherhood was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks on U.S. diplomats in the Libyan city, Bachmann replied that "we are only just beginning" to investigate and suggested that all radical Islamist groups are tied to the Brotherhood. Bachmann, in her letters, targeted several people by name, including Huma Abedin, a top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Abedin was widely liked by leaders in both parties in Washington, so Bachmann's suggestion that she's was a terrorist sparked a backlash. "These allegations about Huma, and the report from which they are drawn, are nothing less than an unwarranted and unfounded attack on an honorable citizen, a dedicated American, and a loyal public servant," Sen. John McCain responded on the Senate floor... Republican Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, along with House Speaker John Boehner, and even Bachmann's former campaign manager, all condemned her publicly.

8. 3 Nov. 2010: Bachmann attacked Obama's trip to India claiming he was bringing an entourage of 3000 (another time she claimed 2000), staying in 870 rooms in five-star Taj Mahal Palace hotel, guarded by an armada of US Navy ships – in all costing American taxpayers $200 million per day. (However, the press's best guess was the cost of the entire trip was $50 million.)

9. "Preexisting conditions?... But no, that wasn't good enough for our president. Wasn't good enough. He demanded that the government have 100 percent control over health care." – Bachmann on congress floor. Related: "Look at page 92 of the [health care] bill. That says after the year 2103 an individual can't purchase private health insurance anymore." – interviewed by CNN's John Roberts on television. Her claims completely false.

10. "There are hundreds and hundreds of scientists, many of them holding Nobel prizes, who believe in intelligent design [not Darwinian evolution]." – Bachmann October 2006 (video of her on panel).

11. In 2007, Bachmann offered a fresh take on the situation in Iraq: Iran, she said, had "already decided that they're going to partition Iraq... And half of Iraq, the western, northern portion of Iraq, is going to be called ... the Iraq State of Islam, something like that. And I'm sorry, I don't have the official name, but it's meant to be the training ground for the terrorists. There's already an agreement made."

12. Bachmann thinks that "Thomas Edison did a pretty patriotic thing for this country by inventing the lightbulb," and she'll be damned if the government gets in the way of you buying one. The government will mandate that lightbulb manufacturers create more energy-efficient bulbs beginning in 2012 and, to Bachmann, this bipartisan-supported bill is unacceptable. In a speech earlier this year, Bachmann said, "I think darn well, you New Hampshirites, if you want to buy Thomas Edison's wonderful invention, you should be able to! The government has no business telling an individual what kind of lightbulb to buy."

13. "In Japan, people have stopped voicing their opinion on health care," said Bachmann in February 2010. There are things that are wrong with Japanese health care, but people are afraid of voicing... [because] they know that would get on a list and they wouldn't get health care. They wouldn't get in. They wouldn't get seen. And so people are afraid. They're afraid to speak back to government. They're afraid to say anything. Is that what we want for our future? That takes us to gangster government at that point and absolute abject corruption." -Quoted in Minnesota Independent.


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