Hey Michele, Do You Pray to Jesus with Those Lying Lips?

One of the “hiccups” in Bachmann’s roll-out that Susan Page referred to on “Hardball” came in an apparently a prepared comment Bachmann gave to a Fox “reporter” on the scene about her decision to stage her presidential announcement in her Iowa hometown, which is ominously named Waterloo.

“John Wayne was from Waterloo, Iowa,” Bachmann said, on cue, to a Fox reporter, “That’s the kind of spirit that I have, too.” As everyone knows by now, John Wayne never lived in Waterloo. However, John Wayne Gacy, the killer clown, who grew up to murder over 30 boys and men, did.

(We can only hope Texas Gov. Rick Perry will try to best Bachmann in Waterloo by making his announcement at the Alamo.)

Like Bachmann’s earlier gaffes about the Revolutionary War history — that the Battle of Lexington took place in New Hampshire and her assertion that the Founding Fathers worked “tirelessly” to free the slaves — these gaffes reveal that, like her doppelganger, Sarah Palin, Bachmann has a lazy intellect and an incurious mind. But what is more relevant here is the fact that, like Palin, she is poorly managed. Who let Bachmann make a public statement, even if it was only for Fox, in which she mistook the most famous resident of her hometown?

Bachmann later tried to walk back the John Wayne Gacy error, but for reasons that defy speculation, Bachmann is standing by her ahistorical assertion that the Founders, a group that collectively owned nearly a thousand slaves, ended slavery, by zeroing on the role of one of the Founders’ sons, John Quincy Adams:

BACHMANN: Well if you look at one of our Founding Fathers, John Quincy Adams, that’s absolutely true. He was a very young boy when he was with his father serving essentially as his father’s secretary. He tirelessly worked throughout his life to make sure that we did in fact one day eradicate slavery… John Quincy Adams most certainly was a part of the Revolutionary War era. He was a young boy but he was actively involved.

Quincy was eight years old on July 4, 1776. (He turned nine a week a later, on July 11.) In 1787, when his father’s colleagues wrote the Constitution in Philadelphia, Quincy was 19 and studying law in Newburyport, Mass. His father, John Adams, was in England at the time, where he was serving as the United States’ first ambassador to the Court of St. James.

John Quincy Adams was many things — president, secretary of state, ambassador, member of the House of Representatives — but he was not a Founding Father.

In the few days since Bachmann announced her candidacy, her propensity for making false and misinformed statements has generated an avalanche of fact-checking.

Factcheck.org:

• 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.
• She criticized the president for a 73 percent increase in government “limousines.” But one department accounted for the increase, and it had a long-term plan, pre-dating Obama, to add armored vehicles. The term “limousine” includes armored vehicles and sedans, not just actual limos.
• She claimed government money received by her husband’s counseling clinics did not benefit the business, because the funds paid for employee training. It’s true the clinics received $24,041 for training, but the business received thousands more in government funds, including money for treating crime victims.
• The three-term congresswoman repeated — on two Sunday shows — the false claim that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said the federal health care law will “cost the economy 800,000 jobs.” The CBO never said that. It said there will be a “small” impact on jobs.

Washington Post:

• Announcement speech, June 27:
  

  “Five decades ago in America, we had less debt than we have today. We had $300 billion or less in debt. A gallon of gasoline was 31 cents and owning a home was part of the American dream. Today, that debt stands at over $14 trillion. A gallon of gas is outrageously expensive and unfortunately, too many millions of Americans know what it is to have a home that’s in foreclosure.”

  Context matters a lot when you use numbers. In this case, Bachmann creates a false impression by using figures from a half-century ago without adjusting for inflation or other factors.

  So, 31 cents in 1961 actually translates to about $2.25 in today’s dollars. That’s still cheaper than a gallon of gas today — about $3.64 nationwide — but not 10 times cheaper.

  There’s a similar problem with Bachmann’s reference to $300 billion in national debt. That sounds puny compared to today’s $14 trillion in debt, but the right way to measure debt is as a percentage of the gross domestic product, which is the broadest measure of the nation’s economy.

  According to the historical tables of the White House budget office (table 7.1), $300 billion was 55 percent of GDP in 1961.

  As of June 23, the total debt was $14.34 trillion, according to the Treasury Department debt meter. Meanwhile, the gross domestic product, as of March 31, was $15.02 trillion, according to the Commerce Department. That’s a ratio of 96 percent, which is certainly pretty bad, but again, not as dramatic a difference as Bachmann suggested.

  In both of these cases, Bachmann could have made valid points about gasoline prices and the debt without resorting to using out-of-context figures.

• Bachmann barely touched on foreign policy in her speech, and she does not really explain her comment on Israel. Bachmann has mischaracterized Obama’s position on Israel in the past. Obama has certainly had tensions with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu over the strategy for peace talks with the Palestinians, but at the same time both countries say security and military ties have never been closer.
  

  “In February 2009, President Obama was very confident that his economic policies would turn the country around within a year.

  He said, and I quote, ‘A year from now, I think people are going to see that we’re starting to make some progress. If I don’t have this done in three years, then there’s going to be a one-term proposition.’ Well, Mr. President, your policies haven’t worked. Spending our way out of the recession hasn’t worked. And so Mr. President, we take you at your word.”

  This quote is from an interview that President Obama had with NBC News about two weeks after taking office. But Bachmann leaves out a few crucial words that undercut her claim that he was “very confident” that his policies would turn around the country “within a year.”

  Here’s is Obama’s full statement, with the missing words in bold: “A year from now, I think people are going to see that we’re starting to make some progress, but there is still going to be some pain out there. If I don’t have this done in three years, then there’s going to be a one-term proposition.”

• Bachmann on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” June 26:
  

  “No, I haven’t misled people at all. I think the question would be asked of President Obama, when you told the American people that, if we borrow $1 trillion from other countries and spend it on a stimulus, that we won’t have unemployment go above 8 percent, and today, as we are sitting here, it’s 9.1 percent and the economy is tanking — that is what’s serious. That’s a very serious statement that the president made.”

  Host Bob Schieffer challenged Bachmann’s history of misstatements in the past — citing, alas, our friends at Politifact — and strangely enough, she responded with yet another misleading statement.

  The president never made any statement suggesting that the stimulus legislation — which totaled about $800 billion, not $1 trillion — would prevent unemployment from going up beyond 8 percent. Bachmann is referring to a projection issued Jan. 9, 2009 — before Obama even took the oath of office — by two aides: Christina Romer, the nominee to head the Council of Economic Advisers, and Jared Bernstein, an incoming economic adviser to Vice President-elect Biden.

  The 14-page report thus was not an official government assessment, nor even an analysis of an actual plan that had passed Congress. Instead, it was an attempt to assess the impact of a possible $775 billion stimulus package and what difference it would make compared to doing nothing. The president-elect had articulated a goal of passing a plan that would “save or create 3 million jobs by the end of 2010.”

  Page 5 of the report included a chart that showed that unemployment would peak at 8 percent in 2009, compared to 9 percent in 2010 if nothing was done. But the report also contained numerous caveats and warnings because, after all, it was merely a projection. At the time, other economists had similar forecasts — Romer and Bernstein were in the mid-range — but the economy turned out to be in deeper trouble than most people thought.

  In any case, Obama never said that.

Associated Press:

• BACHMANN: “Overnight we are hearing that potentially 10 to 30,000 people could have been killed in the strike.” – Criticizing Obama in May for the “foolish” U.S. intervention in Libya, and citing what she said were reports of a civilian death toll from a NATO strike.

  THE FACTS: The U.S. ambassador to Libya, Gene Cretz, said in late April that U.S. officials have seen reports that 10,000 to 30,000 people may have died in Moammar Gadhafi’s crackdown on protesters and the fighting between rebels and pro-government forces, but it is hard to know if that is true. He was speaking about all casualties of the conflict; no one has attributed such a death toll to NATO bombing alone, much less to a single strike.

• BACHMANN: “It’s ironic and sad that the president released all of the oil from the strategic oil reserve. … There’s only a limited amount of oil that we have in the strategic oil reserve. It’s there for emergencies.” – On CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday.

  THE FACTS: Obama did not empty all the oil from the strategic reserve. He approved the release of 30 million barrels, about 4 percent of the 727 million barrels stored in salt caverns along the Texas and Louisiana coasts. It’s true that the U.S. normally taps the reserve for more dire emergencies than exist today, and that exposes Obama to criticism that he acted for political gain. But the reserve has never been fuller; it held 707 million barrels when last tapped, after 2008 hurricanes.

• BACHMANN: “One. That’s the number of new drilling permits under the Obama administration since they came into office.” – Comment to a conservative conference in Iowa in March.

  THE FACTS: The Obama administration issued more than 200 new drilling permits before the Gulf oil spill alone. Over the past year, since new safety standards were imposed, the administration has issued more than 60 shallow-water drilling permits. Since the deep-water moratorium was lifted in October, nine new wells have been approved.

What makes all this lying by a politician more relevant than usual is that Michele Bachmann is a fundamentalist Christian of the most extreme right-wing variety. For example, she claims that God gave her a “calling” to run for office.

Maybe God also exempted her from the Ninth Commandment, “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor,” but only when she’s trying to conceal her closet socialism or when “neighbor” refers to a Democrat.