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November 21, 2011 at 1:01 pm 
Ed Brayton Michele Bachmann has shown a disturbing tendency to repeat clearly absurd claims made to her by people at her appearances — or perhaps to just invent them herself. Either one is a bad thing, of course. At a townhall meeting on Wednesday, she dropped a few of these nuggets of stupidity.
– “Under Obamacare illegal aliens don’t have to pay for Obamacare. Only American citizens pay for Obamacare. [...] Illegal aliens have the possibility of getting the care, but they have no requirement to pay for the care. Only the citizens do.”
Wrong. The health care reform bill did not change the rules on citizenship at all, in any way. Hospitals must treat anyone who needs treatment, including those who may be here illegally. What would she propose as an alternative, letting them die on the sidewalks?
– “One man stood up, he was over 7-feet tall. He was a physician in the community. And he said, ‘I had a little lady in my office and because of Obamacare, I had to call the IRS and I had to get a number to put on a form before I could see her.’”
He was either lying to you or he was a figment of your imagination. Maybe Jesus came to you in a dream, mistakenly thinking you were a Muslim. The only role the IRS plays in health care reform at all is enforcing the health insurance requirement, which has nothing to do with any doctor’s office would have to do. And even that part doesn’t to into effect until 2014.
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The truth of the story doesn’t matter. It has the same feel of the stories told in churches:
Unrelated details added in to give the feel of truthiness. She’s flashing her bonafides as an Evangelical, not making a point.
Whenever Michelle starts one of these stories, in the back of my head I hear, “One time at bandcamp…”
Maybe she is just looking for endorsements from Ken Kesey and Timothy Leary.
Poor Michele. It must be those migraines.
But otherwise: I wish that at the GOP debates they call each other out on various absurdities, such as:
“Hey, Rick, how’d that pray for rain work for ya?”
“Tell us some more about Libya, Herman!” (snicker snicker.)
And so on.
Is she certain that it was a man and not a 7-foot rabbit?
There is no doubt Bachmann is cognitively impaired and has little contact with reality.
The real question. Why in the hell do the people in her district keep electing her? What’s their excuse?
The Dems have even run some decent candidates against her. Tinklenburg or some such.
Now that would quite a miracle to bolster her evangelical cred. A Lazarushian spectacle for all to see.
It was a 7 foot tall invisible pink rabbit. With an MD.
Yes. Yes she would.
I think there are people who would actually look forward to that, concerned only with the mess it would entail. If they’re an actual corpse, you can’t arrest them for littering.
So Michele Bachmann is fleshing out her outrageous stories with outrageous details. There seems to be a progression to her craziness; when will the the melt down occur?
Bachmann should watch the The Amazing Colossal Man or Attack of the 50 Foot Woman then we will see how tall the physicians in her audiences get.
Until is it proved otherwise, every statement by Bachmann has to be assumed to be a work of fantasy.
When she finally loses the primary to whatever clown the GOP actually nominates, I wonder if Bachmann will survive the mental discordance. God told her to run and yet she lost. I have an image of the deranged robot on Star Trek repeating ‘sterilize’ as Kirk & Spock transport it to deep space to explode.
The only out she might have to prevent a mental collapse is to blame her lose on all the lies she had to utter to stay competitive. Like that will ever happen.
Wouldn’t that alone be enough to make the insurance mandate constitutional. I don’t like the idea of the mandate, but understand it is needed if hospitals have to treat everyone who shows up.
If the insurance mandate is ruled unconstitutional, would the treatment mandate also be unconstitutional?
I realize you don’t have any religious test for candidates for public office, but has anyone suggested placing a limit on the number of invisible friends a candidate can have? MB is way over any reasonable number.
What, and discriminate against polytheists?
The problem is she didn’t, as far as she was concerned, tell any lies. Anything that she says happened but didn’t, in her mind, SHOULD HAVE happened and is therefore as good as genuine facts. I know people like her. Belief that something SHOULD be true, because it lines up with their current worldview, is the only kind of ‘evidence’ that they care about.
Is she certain that it was a man and not a 7-foot rabbit?
Couldn’t have been Harvey. He was only 6′ 3-1/2 inches
“Merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.”
Honestly, Poo Bah’s story of a decapitated head bowing to the executioner is more believable than one of Bachmann’s stories.
What makes you think her quest for the presidency will end with the republican nomination. If the GOP nominates someone who isn’t jesusy enough for her (ie, a Mormon), I have zero doubt that she is delusional enough to believe that she could win in the general election as an independent.
In fact, I think we should encourage that belief in her.
Is safe yet to declare that the Bachmann campaign has ‘jumped the shark’? Her most recent comments seem to have become even more insane. Admittedly this is difficult given where she started on the scale of sanity.
I think she has become too nutty even for the nuts and is saying anything to garner what little attention she can.
“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
St. Mandi
I think she has become too nutty even for the nuts and is saying anything to garner what little attention she can.
Exactly. Cain and Perry have been getting all the media attention because of their gaffes. Bachmann knows she’s got to make a bigger gaffe if she’s going to pull the press attention away from them.
When she finally loses the primary…I wonder if Bachmann will survive the mental discordance.
Of course she will. At that point God will reveal to her that He had some Other Reason for telling her to run.
If it were true God told her to run, it would be evidence of a divine, if rather cruel, sense of humour.
I wouldn’t be surprised if she proposed letting them die on the sidewalks. Am I alone in thinking this?
If the insurance mandate is ruled unconstitutional, would the treatment mandate also be unconstitutional?
No. Completely separate issue.
What MIGHT be also ruled unconstitutional is the part of the bill which mandates coverage be offered even in the fact of pre-existing conditions. And that’s mighty popular with the public, almost as popular as the buy-insurance-from-us mandate is with the greedy private insurance companies.
“One man stood up, he was over 7-feet tall.”
Harvey was already mentioned, but could MB sound any crazier if she tried?
I expect this doctor. like Harvey, to reappear, again and again, until his head is hidden in the clouds (and Cheeses only knows what other bizarre features!).
And yet MB will STILL have thousands who vote for her. Because the ‘Mer’kin 23% only cares about never having been wrong about anything ever.
Dennis N @1 explains it. Michelle Bachmann is a fundamentalist (not just an evangelical, but a fundamentalist) whose zeal can only be understood by those who have some understanding of that culture. Her words are absolute nonsense to those of us in the reality-based community–evidence-based truth and reason go right out the window when she speaks. But for her and her audience, it all makes perfect sense. Telling the right emotional story is far more important than telling the right factual story.
Consider what Dr. X had to say about another fundamentalist just yesterday:
We will never reach these people with facts, folks, nor will we reach them with truth. The gut, not truth or reason, is their guide. I think we’ve passed the point at which they can even be reached at all. They simply speak an entirely different language and inhabit an entirely alien culture.
FTFY
Why does anyone still believe that these people have “moral views”?
It’s all just emotionally-driven identity politics.
And the emotion is “I feel good when people who are different from me get hurt”.
Don’t forget “I feel good when people are forced to do what I think they should do.”
Letting them die on the sidewalks? Oh dear me no. We have alleys for that. (h/t Carl Jacobs on a.s.r)
d cwilson If the GOP nominates someone who isn’t jesusy enough for her (ie, a Mormon), I have zero doubt that she is delusional enough to believe that she could win in the general election as an independent.
In fact, I think we should encourage that belief in her.
Ooh! An excellent idea! If she runs, she won’t get any more than 1% of the vote – the Republicans who are too anti-Mormon to ever vote for Romney (half my family, in fact).
But that 1% might make all the difference in next year’s election.
KG If it were true God told her to run, it would be evidence of a divine, if rather cruel, sense of humour.
Yahweh is quite the card. Remember when he told Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, and almost forgot to tell him it was all a joke? Good times, good times.
“If it were true God told her to run, it would be evidence of a divine, if rather cruel, sense of humour.”
It was probably Loki.
Yeah, probably. I worked briefly with a guy who had been a CEO or CFO or something similar of a physicians’ group in the south (an organization that provides MD staffing to hospitals and other care institutions) to do some consulting for hospital emergency departments. He had lost that executive job because of legal difficulties related to the job (surprise, surprise, a corrupt executive officer). His very first suggestion:
“They (the emergency department) need to start turning away patients who don’t have the means to pay.”
Of course, this is against the law in almost every state in the nation but this wasn’t the sort of person to worry about such details.