Skeptic Project

It quickly became apparent that something was amiss. When CNN, for reasons that don't make sense, began airing Rep. Michele Bachmann's (R-Minn.) response to the State of the Union, it appeared that she was speaking to someone, but it wasn't viewers.

As it turns out, there were two cameras in the room with her. Bachmann looked directly into the Tea Party Express camera, so the national television audience saw her from the wrong angle.

While that was distracting, it was the least of Bachmann's problems -- the right-wing Minnesotan clearly isn't well.

Insisting that she was not upstaging the official GOP response to President Obama's State of the Union, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) offered a combative and highly misleading speech of her own following the president's address. In her "Tea Party Response," Bachmann repeated a litany of false right-wing talking points about everything from the Recovery Act and job losses to the debt and "16,500 IRS agents."

Watching the nearly seven minutes of blistering stupidity, it was hard to avoid the fact that Bachmann has created some bizarro world for herself, detached from the reality the rest of us live in.

But here's the funny part: substantively, Bachmann's nonsense was roughly identical to the foolishness repeated by Paul Ryan in the official Republican SOTU response. Note Media Matters' fact-check of Ryan's speech and then check Media Matters' fact-check of Bachmann's speech. The similarities are striking -- with a few exceptions, they had the exact same message.

The importance of this is that Republicans seemed more than a little annoyed yesterday that Bachmann was muddling their message and making the GOP look bad with her wild-eyed craziness. Their concerns are understandable, but they're missing the more important point: Paul and Bachmann struck different tones, but they were making the same argument, and both were equally ridiculous.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/