UPDATE: Michele Bachmann, the new Joseph Goebbels

Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann received her law degree from Oral Roberts University.

Q: What do you call two gay guys named Bob going to college in Oklahoma?
A: Oral Roberts.

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The Bachmann family farm accepted over a quarter of a million dollars in federal agriculture subsidies from 1995 to 2006. Most of the subsidies went to dairy and corn, which are heavily price-controlled. Bachmann's personal profit from the farm has ranged from $2,000 some years to $50,000 in 2008, according to tax documents. Clearly the Tea Party platform of minimal government does not apply to her.

CityPages' article, The Chosen One, paints Bachmann as a stupid, religious nut just like Christine O'Donnell. Before Bachmann was elected to the House, she was on the Stillwater School Board. Her dogmatic clique of school board members would not allow the Disney movie Aladdin to be shown because it involved magic and supposedly taught paganism.

Bachmann said the health care law passed last year is the "crown jewel of socialism" and said repealing it "is the motivation of my life."

Bachmann's government-supplied largesse, and the generous House medical plan, results in her living high above the unwashed masses. She believes that insurance companies, as a part of the larger market, will always make proper decisions because it is good for business. On the contrary, those companies will selfishly only do what is best for them, regardless of the effect on ordinary people.

I have personal experience with and/or know people who have experienced the following:

• Insurance companies will sometimes approve a procedure in advance, but when the bill comes, they find a way to pay only a small percentage of the claim, e.g. 1/8. And somehow the arrangement with doctors and hospitals allows them to collect the difference between the full retail amount and the amount of the insurance company reimbursement.
• Insurance companies will sometimes approve a procedure in advance, but when the bill comes, they will simply deny coverage under their weasel clause that coverage does not guarantee payment.
• Insurance companies will sometimes deny new applicants for mysterious reasons; perhaps age plays a major factor here.

This is the brave new world that Bachmann deems as "the motivation of my life." She believes that allowing insurance companies to deny coverage on a whim is better than government regulation, probably because the Bible does not mention healthcare. Bachmann should read the exploits of early Christians, especially the part where they created soup kitchens for the poor and made sure that widows were not forced to become prostitutes to support their families.

Bachmann added: "The most egregious moral wrong of all is that today's government is intentionally consuming the labor of future Americans that aren't even born."

So why did Republicans vigorously demand that tax cuts be extended for wealthy people? If they had denied tax cuts for everyone, they would have a consistent position.

And Bachmann's partner in religious fascism, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, continued the song-and-dance in fantasy land by saying: "And according to the Constitution, nobody in Washington has a right to force anybody to buy something against their will."

In fact, the government has the right to do lots of things against someone's will: draft someone into the military, determine the age when people vote, regulate interstate commerce, collect income taxes, collect taxes on alcohol and tobacco products, etc.

McConnell continued with: "We didn't swear an oath to uphold whatever's popular. We swore an oath to uphold the Constitution."

McConnell appears to have his history confused. This is not remotely similar to the situation where President Eisenhower sent Regular Army troops in during the "Little Rock Nine" incident of 1957. Integrating public schools was certainly not popular in Arkansas, or in the South for that matter, yet Eisenhower did it because it was Constitutionally and morally the right thing to do.

So in addition to their prowess as masters of propaganda, Bachmann and McConnell appear to have become adept at mimicking Josef Mengele, the infamous doctor involved in brutal and inhuman medical experiments in the Nazi concentration camps.