Lois Romano has a must-read on Michele Bachmann, whose rhetorical Tea Party purism doesn't jibe with her actual, you know, record or history:
She earned a federal salary as a lawyer for the IRS (an agency despised by the Tea Party), for example. Pressed on whether she took Americans to court to force them to pay back taxes, she answers carefully. “Our employer was the United States Department of Treasury. That’s who paid my salary,” she says …
Bachmann owned a stake in her father-in-law’s farm that received more than $250,000 in federal agriculture subsidies between 1995 and 2008. She says that money all stayed with her in-laws. In Congress, she tried to secure more than $3.7 million in federal earmarks for her district—the kind of pet projects she has blamed for excessive spending. And she railed against Obama’s $800 billion–plus Recovery Act as wasteful, then signed a half-dozen letters seeking stimulus funds for local projects. Her requests in 2009 echoed the arguments Republicans lampooned Obama for using. A bridge project could create nearly 3,000 jobs a year, Bachmann wrote, while a highway project would “promote economic prosperity.”
Hypocrisy? Remember Sarah Palin's furious lobbing for the bridge to nowhere and subsequent lies about it? I'd say it makes Bachmann the perfect red state candidate: addicted to federal funds but convinced that only others benefit from government. She is the perfect "Keep government out of my Medicare" candidate. And a great performer and debater.
(Photo: Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Republican presidential candidate and Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), and Rep. Steve King (R-IA) leave a news conference at the U.S. Capitol July 13, 2011 in Washington, DC. By Win McNamee/Getty Images)
The Dish 