Batshit Crazy AND Pants on Fire

Michele Bachmann, who has suddenly shot to the top of RepubliCON polling, scares me. Well, not her, but the people who are willing to blindly follow her, despite the demonstrable facts that she is not only batshit crazy but also apparently unwilling -- or unable -- to tell the truth.

PolitiFact has the facts, and they are not pretty:

1. One. That's the number of new drilling permits under the Obama administration since they came into office.
2. Small businesses that have "$250,000 in gross sales for the business. They're the ones that are looking at massive tax increases.
3. Speaker Pelosi ... has been busy sticking the taxpayer with her $100,000 bar tab for alcohol on the military jets that she's flying.
4. Page 92 of the House health care bill "says specifically that people can't purchase private health insurance after a date certain.

And these are just the ones that are so egregiously false that they earned the coveted "pants on fire" rating by Politifact. There are lots more, so many in fact, that I've come to believe that she really can't help it. She is a pathological liar who would just as soon make something up than tell the truth.

FactCheck also has a lot of stuff on Bachmann's reality-challenged appearance on the Sunday Talking Heads shows. Here's a sample:

· Bachmann falsely claimed that she and her husband "have never gotten a penny" from a family farm that received federal subsidies. But she reported income from the farm in 2006, 2008 and 2009 — the most recent year available — on her congressional financial disclosure statements.
· She claimed she had been "faithful" to her pledge not to request federal earmarks. But she requested $40 million in transportation earmarks in the 2009 fiscal year budget after taking the pledge, later claiming such projects should not be subjected to her promise. She withdrew her requests after the House Republicans took a party position in 2010 not to seek earmarks.
· Bachmann wrongly blamed President Obama for increasing the number of federal transportation workers who earn more than $170,000 from one to 1,690 during the recession. At least two-thirds of those employees were receiving more than $170,000 before Obama took office.

Okay, she would be totally laughable as a serious candidate for president in normal times. But these are not normal times.

We would do well to heed the advice of Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi when it comes to considering Michele Bachmann, from "Michele Bachmann's Holy War":

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.
. . .
Michele entered one of the most ridiculous learning institutions in the Western Hemisphere, a sort of highway rest area with legal accreditation called the O.W. Coburn School of Law; Michele was a member of its inaugural class in 1979.
Originally a division of Oral Roberts University, this august academy, dedicated to the teaching of "the law from a biblical worldview," has gone through no fewer than three names — including the Christian Broadcasting Network School of Law. Those familiar with the darker chapters in George W. Bush's presidency might recognize the school's current name, the Regent University School of Law. Yes, this was the tiny educational outhouse that, despite being the 136th-ranked law school in the country, where 60 percent of graduates flunked the bar, produced a flood of entrants into the Bush Justice Department.
Regent was unabashed in its desire that its graduates enter government and become "change agents" who would help bring the law more in line with "eternal principles of justice," i.e., biblical morality. To that end, Bachmann was mentored by a crackpot Christian extremist professor named John Eidsmoe, a frequent contributor to John Birch Society publications who once opined that he could imagine Jesus carrying an M16 and who spent considerable space in one of his books musing about the feasibility of criminalizing blasphemy.

There's a lot more to this analysis of Bachmann, but it's well worth the read. She might be a batshit crazy pathological liar to those of us in the Reality-Based community, but she has a following over on the Wingnut edge of things, plus she is on a mission -- a crusade -- to bring a "bible-based" interpretation of our laws.

So it's goodbye to the Separation of Church and State, and hello to the American Mullahs of the Christian Dominionist movement. And people like me -- and I suspect you, Constant Reader -- will be among the first to be executed for such crimes as "blasphemy"...