A new USA Today/Gallup poll finds that support for the presidential campaign of Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) is imploding:
The survey, taken Thursday through Sunday, charts a GOP field that seems headed toward a showdown between Perry, with 31 percent backing, and Romney, at 24 percent.
The only other candidate in double digits is Texas Rep. Ron Paul, at 13 percent. Support for Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann has plummeted to 5 percent.
Veteran Republican strategist Ed Rollins, who resigned as Bachmann’s campaign manager earlier this month, says the results could signal “a drawn-out process” and extended primary fight between Perry and Romney, both of whom are likely to have ample money and other resources.
But for Bachmann, he says, “The only way she can get back in this race is to somehow win Iowa,” which holds the opening caucuses early next year.
It’s hard to know what has caused the collapse of Bachmann’s polling. It may well be that her base of hard-right, proudly ignorant Republican voters found that they prefer Texas Gov. Rick Perry over her because, well, he’s a man and she is not.
It’s also possible that she got caught telling one lie too many.
From the moment she burst into the national consciousness in an October 2008 appearance on Chris Matthews’ show, “Hardball” on MSNBC, with her full-throated call for McCarthyite witch hunts to root out anti-American members of Congress, Bachmann has demonstrated that she will do or say just about anything to get attention.
After she entered the presidential race, she was caught making a series of misleading statements about the uncredentialed Christian “psychology” center she and her husband operate, its funding and whether it engages in the discredited and dangerous practice of “pray-away-the-gay” therapy.
A loud proclaimer against the evils of socialism, she got caught attempting to cover up her family’s practice of collecting thousands of dollars in socialist government hand-outs in the form of grants to the counseling center and a family farm. And, after pledging not to take earmarks for her district, she got caught with her hand in the cookie jar with a request for $40 million in transportation earmarks.
A devotee of a hard-right, judgmental and unforgiving form of Christianity, in her attacks on Pres. Obama, Bachmann has been caught multiple times violating the 9th Commandment, which forbids bearing false witness. She falsely stated that his trip to India would cost taxpayers $200 million per day. She criticized him for a 73 percent rise in the purchase of government limousines, some of which were actually armored vehicles and all of which were ordered during the Bush administration. She also lied about the president’s energy policy, claiming he refused to permit new drilling for oil — in fact, at least 39 shallow water wells and at least six deep water wells had been permitted — and that he released “all the oil” from the strategic oil reserve, when in reality he’d released just 30 million out of the 727 million barrels in the reserve.
While Bachmann’s lies boosted her popularity among tea party types and right-wing ignoramuses as long as they were repeated inside the fact-averse environs of the GOP-Fox News propaganda echo chamber, she crossed the line after the most recent Republican debate when she told a lie about the HPV vaccine that, were it to become widely perceived as a fact, could cost the lives of millions of American women.
Here’s how a CBS affiliate in Minnesota covered Bachmann’s statement:
Bachmann is under fire for comments some are calling reckless, for instance: that the HPV vaccination may cause mental retardation.
Health care professionals say Bachmann’s comments about the HPV vaccine are not just untrue: They also could do serious damage to efforts to immunize millions of pre-teen girls.
Here’s what she said on Tuesday, after she said a supporter approached her “in tears”:’She told me her daughter took the vaccine and suffered from mental retardation, thereafter this is a very dangerous drug. There are very dangerous consequences.”
That’s FALSE.
According the Centers for Disease Control, the HPV vaccine is safe and almost 100 percent effective against cervical cancer.
It is administered to pre-teen girls, because it is most effective before sexual activity begins.
Thirty-five million doses have been given. Side effects are rare, with some 19,000 cases reported.
And there’s not a single case of what Bachmann calls “mental retardation.”
That’s NOT THE WHOLE STORY.
The CDC says 37.8 percent of Minnesota girls completed the 3-dose series of HPV vaccines in 2010.
That’s up from 27 percent in 2009.
But it’s still far below the 50 percent rate health professionals say is necessary to effectively immunize pre-teens against cervical cancer later in life.
It would be nice to believe that Republican voters finally got fed up with Michele Bachmann’s serial falsehoods, but, face it, that is unlikely. If nothing else, Republican voters have shown that they’ll believe just about anything, no matter how outrageous, as long as it fits into their distorted view of the world — a world in which whites are superior to other races, America is hated because of its freedom and Jesus Christ was a Ayn Randian capitalist who viewed the poor, sick and homeless as pariahs, just like they do.
At best, Republicans have either moved on to the male candidate whose Luddite, know-nothing views are roughly the same as Bachmann, as was noted earlier — or perhaps they are rejecting her, not because she is a liar, but because she has proved to be so bad at it.
