In her response to President Obama’s State of the Union address last night, Tea Party Caucus organizer, American history non-scholar and crazy-eyed lunatic Michele Bachmann (R-MN) said that the Administration “may put 16,500 IRS agents in charge of policing President Obama’s healthcare bill.”
It’s a shame Congresswoman Bachmann doesn’t have access to the Google. From Factcheck.org:
Q: Will the IRS hire 16,500 new agents to enforce the health care law?
A: No. The law requires the IRS mostly to hand out tax credits, not collect penalties. The claim of 16,500 new agents stems from a partisan analysis based on guesswork and false assumptions, and compounded by outright misrepresentation.
CNN calls Bachmann’s assertion “at best misleading.” The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent described it as a “ridiculous falsehood.”
In other words, it’s a lie. The IRS isn’t hiring 16,500 new agents to police the Affordable Care Act or for any other reason. To believe it in the first place requires a level of paranoia only an irrational Obama-loathing ideologue like Bachmann can muster.
Bachmann and the other retrogrades who email this nonsense to each other point to it as perfect evidence of the need to resist Obama’s plan to have an all-powerful government intrude into their daily lives. It’s a good talking point amongst the know-nothing set, but for the rest of the country it’s just a paranoid rant from a fringe figure so untethered from reality, she’s willing to stare almost directly into a television camera and repeat it.
But people who really want what’s best for the country don’t make policy based on lies. Why spend millions of dollars or pass laws meant to affect something that doesn’t exist? Couldn’t that be dangerous? If you don’t believe that humans are causing climate change, for example, wouldn’t you be opposed to cap and trade as an unnecessary and potentially dangerous overreach by a government acting hysterically in response to a non-existent threat? Wouldn’t government action to combat the made up threat of global climate change be a basis for citizens to be “armed and dangerous” to oppose it? Michele Bachmann does.
In her defense, it’s possible that Bachmann isn’t that manipulative. She may just be as impossibly stupid as she seems.
