Seriously, what did you expect?
That Bachmann is a known nut-job, factually and judgementally 'challenged', by which I mean deficient, has been common knowledge for years. There is no shortage of documentation about her behavior; she is as bat shit crazy as Orly Taitz. She made her dumb statements - twice - last March in New Hampshire, which should have put you on notice. Once is a simple, honest mis-speak; twice, from prepared material, is deliberate willful ignorance.
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Shame on you all for enabling her continuing delusions, and your own. Worse are those of you who fund those delusions.
An interview with her former Chief of Staff explains what kind of an elected representative Bachmann is (the most damning material is some 13 minutes into the video) :
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Michele Bachmann has now lost the staff of an entire state campaign. Prior to that, she lost other key, senior members of her campaign. She loses key members of her congressional staff on an unusually frequent basis. She is temperamental and hard to work for, she is apparently chronically irresponsible.
Michele Bachmann is utterly 'unpresidential'; heck, she's not even up to the standards one would expect for any elected office, including Dog Catcher, much less Congress. She is clearly unqualified for the executive branch of government at any level.
She has a long history of losing staff, as outlined in this piece from the City Pages in Minnesota, back in July 2010, about the fifth chief of staff to leave Bachmann in four years:
But the news broke yesterday that, for the fifth time in four years, Michele Bachmann is without a chief of staff: Ron Carey is out. He lasted just five months. On top of that, fundraising guru Zandra Wolcott has also jumped ship. No explanation was given for either departure.
Carey had replaced Michelle Marston, who helped engineer Bachman's anti-health care reform protest in Washington, D.C. last year -- the one where Sean Hannity was busted by Jon Stewart for bogus video inflating the size of the crowd. The one that cost taxpayers $14,000.
After Marston's departure, one GOP congressman said Bachmann was having a hard time holding on to staff because of her notorious verbal hand grenades and fact-challenged rhetoric. "When your captain's crazy, it's time to find a new ship," the lawmaker said.
The churn started early in the congresswoman's career. Back in 2008 during her first term, Eric Black at MinnPost wrote: The only people still working for Bachmann's office who were around in the first quarter of her term are in lower-level positions, handling phones, scheduling and grants.Then we have more recent interviews describing what it is like to work for Bachmann.
From CBS News:
The entire paid New Hampshire staff for Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann has resigned, in another blow to the Minnesota congresswoman's foundering campaign.Jeff Chidester, Bachmann's former New Hampshire campaign director, confirmed the mass exodus. "The New Hampshire team has quit," he said. "We'll issue a joint statement as to our reasons why."Typically, Bachmann initially denied this factually accurate and correct story:
Chidester's confirmation, made via email and voice mail to National Journal and CBS, followed a confusing day in which Bachmann insisted that reports of the staff departures were untrue. But Chidester said he left last week and informed "people that are closest to Michele."
"I'm sorry the national team is confused," he said. "They shouldn't be."
One of the aides who quit, Caroline Gilger, Bachmann's southern state field director, is joining the rival campaign of Texas Gov. Rick Perry.
According to the New Hampshire Union Leader, a total of four staffers have left: Chidester, Gilger, Tom Lukacz and Nicole Yurek. Uncertain was the future of staff member Matt LeDuc.
Chidester is a longtime Bachmann friend and supporter and a well-known radio talk show host. Reached by email on Friday, Chidester told CBS/NJ that the staff will be issuing a joint statement. "We are more than a team, we have all bonded over the past few months," Chidester wrote. "This is one of the finest group of people I have every had the pleasure of working with. Each one of them is smart, dedicated, and committed to each other. We have not had an opportunity to talk to each other since the story broke, but once we do, we will release a joint statement."
In an interview with Radio Iowa, Bachmann expressed incredulity over news of the resignations, first reported by New Hampshire television station WMUR. "That is a shocking story to me," she said. "I don't know where that came from. We have called staff in New Hampshire to find out where that came from and the staff have said that isn't true, so I don't know if this is just a bad story that's being fed by a different candidate or campaign. I have no idea where this came from, but we've made calls and it's certainly not true."However, the AP also confirms the story. Bachmann will try to deny it for awhile, then she will try to spin it that this is really all part of her plan -- or some equally lame excuse.
And ABC news, on their blog, added this:
Five staffers, including Jeff Chidester, a longtime friend and conservative talk-radio host, have left the Minnesota congresswoman’s campaign.
The departing staff members also included Nicole Yurek, Tom Lukacz, director of operations Matt LeDuc and Southern New Hampshire Field Director Caroline Gigler, as first reported by ABC affiliate WMUR.
Among those [others] to leave were campaign manager Ed Rollins, deputy manager David Polyansky and pollster Ed Goeas. Soon after, longtime adviser Andy Parish left the campaign to return to work in Bachmann’s Washington congressional office and spokesman Doug Sachtleben quit.
How presidential is it not to know this well in advance of it hitting the press? How presidential is it to have such chaos in your congressional office? How presidential, how fiscally responsible is it to continue a campaign this deep in debt, and sinking fast without a hope of gaining the nomination? And most of all, how presidential, how Republican and how Tea Party is it, to be so consistently factually deficient, so lacking in reality in favor of ideology? I believe I recognize this photo, it is from her interview with Chris Matthews, on MSNBC, the one where she called for a witch hunt to expose the anti-American members of Congress. This isn't so much a bad photo, as it is the real Bachmann, the crazy woman on the far religious right.
