Bachmann brought out a tired and hilariously stupid lie against Mitt Romney at the American Taliban debate last night on ABC:
If you look at Mitt Romney as the governor of Massachusetts, he's the only governor that put into place socialized medicine..
Politifact rated the claim "pants on fire", a term it reserves for the most blatant of lies. The claim is somewhat related to the 2008 Politifact Lie of the Year, the supposed "government takeover" of health care.
You can read those stories for the background. I don't find it surprising or even interesting. Republicans have been tossing out one bald faced lie after another about basically every political issue in the nation over the past four years or so, even more so than in previous years and decades as the press has shown itself to be utterly disinterested and bored with fact checking actual investigative reporting. The press has relegated itself to the role of national stenographers that allow politicians to lie with impunity.
What I find interesting is just how big of a liar Michele Bachmann and most of the 2012 GOP field is, a record largely revealed by the endless primary debates we all wish would just fucking stop.
Bachmann has accumulated 37 statements between false and "pants on fire", to just eight true statements. Examples include saying that President Obama "has the lowest public approval ratings of any president in modern times" (in fact nine presidents were worse off than Obama, including both Bush's and Ronald Reagan), saying Obama "has virtually no one in his cabinet with private-sector experience" (wrong), that there's only been one new oil drilling permit under the Obama administration (there were hundreds before the gulf disaster and dozens after), and alleging that ACORN will get money from the Census Bureau and collecting census data (both wrong).
These aren't "oops I meant 135 instead of 145" mistakes, these are intentional and blatant lies from a serial liar meant to misinform the American people so that they won't vote for her opponents based on the truth of their positions and actions.
The rest of the GOP field is pretty awful as well.
Herman Cain has zero true claims and only three mostly true statements. Contrast that to 13 lies between false and "pants on fire", which account for 56% of his statements.
Rick Perry has more true and mostly true statements than all of Cain's statements combined (25 to 23), but has 33 statements between false and "pants on fire" of his own. Perry has exactly 50 statements across the three true categories and 50 distortions and lies.
The field breaks down like this, most honest to biggest liar (Obama included for comparison):
Jon Huntsman
True statements: 10 (76%)
False statements: 3 (Pants on fire: 1)
Barack Obama (70%)
True statements: 233
False statements: 97 (Pants on fire: 4)
Mitt Romney
True statements: 54 (63%)
False statements: 31 (Pants on fire: 8)
Ron Paul
True statements: 18 (62%)
False statements: 11 (Pants on fire: 2)
Rick Perry (50%)
True statements: 54
False statements: 54 (Pants on fire: 10)
Rick Santorum (53%)
True statements: 7
False statements: 6 (Pants on fire: 1)
Newt Gingrich (43%)
True statements: 14
False statements: 18 (Pants on fire: 6)
Herman Cain (30%)
True statements: 7
False statements: 16 (Pants on fire: 3)
Michele Bachmann (27%)
True statements: 14
False statements: 36 (Pants on fire: 11)
President Obama has had 330 claims checked yet only had four of them rated "pants on fire", compared to 11 for Bachmann and 10 for Perry. If Perry and Bachmann had the same number of total statements checked, they'd have 72 and 29 "pants on fire" statements, respectively. Ever the GOP's truth sayer, Jon Huntsman would have run up 23 "pants on fire" lies at that rate.
Isn't it also interesting that the list when sorted by honesty also happens to be almost perfectly sorted by liberal (or in this case moderate) to conservative ideology, with the most conservative being at the bottom?
What a shock that the more conservative the 2012 GOP candidate is, the bigger liar they are.
