MINNESOTA REP. Michele Bachmann's bid for the Republican presidential nomination is quick becoming a delightful treasure--of eye-popping inaccuracies.
Bachmann formally announced her campaign on June 27 in her hometown of Waterloo, Iowa. In a speech that quickly circulated around the Internet, Bachmann proudly told Fox News, "Well, what I want [people] to know is just like, John Wayne was from Waterloo, Iowa. That's the kind of spirit that I have, too."
Except, of course, deceased Republican actor John Wayne was not from Waterloo. She's getting him confused with John Wayne Gacy--a serial killer who raped and murdered 33 teenage boys in the 1970s and made his living dressed as a clown--who lived in Waterloo for a time.
The Bachmann campaign seems fairly light on fact checking overall. According to an Associated Press report, Bachmann recently claimed that she's "never gotten a penny" from a family farm that's raked in huge government subsidies.
Except, of course, her personal financial disclosure statements show tens of thousands in personal income from the farm's operation.
According to the Associated Press:
Examining 24 of her statements, Politifact.com, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking service of the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, found just one to be fully true and 17 to be false (seven of them "pants on fire" false). No other Republican candidate whose statements have been vigorously vetted matched that record of inaccuracy.
A look at some of her recent statements and how they compare with the facts:
BACHMANN: "The farm is my father-in-law's farm. It's not my husband and my farm. It's my father-in-law's farm. And my husband and I have never gotten a penny of money from the farm."-- Fox News Sunday.
THE FACTS: In personal financial disclosure reports required annually from members of Congress, Bachmann reported that she holds an interest in a family farm in Independence, Wis., with her share worth between $100,000 and $250,000.
The farm, which was owned by her father-in-law, produced income for Bachmann of at least $32,500 and as much as $105,000 from 2006 through 2009, according to the reports she filed for that period. The farm also received federal crop and disaster subsidies, according to a database maintained by the Environmental Working Group. From 1995 through 2010, the farm got $259,332 in federal payments.
When asked about the subsidies and her income from the farm late last year, a spokesman for Bachmann said only that she wasn't involved in decisions about the running of the farm.
Bachmann told the Associated Press on Monday that her husband became a trustee of the farm because his father had dementia before he died two years ago, and "oversees the legal entity."
"Everything we do with those forms is in an abundance of caution," she said, insisting she and her husband receive no farm income despite the forms reporting it.
But that's nothing--especially for a woman who once suggested that singer Melissa Etheridge's breast cancer "may be an opportunity for her now to be open to some spiritual things, now that she is suffering with that physical disease. She is a lesbian."
According to Mother Jones, former state senator Dean Johnson, who was the Republican minority leader during Bachmann's time in St. Paul, has said, "I don't think I ever served with anybody who I mistrusted more, from either side of the aisle."
