With their manic, absurd defenses of BP, certain leading Republicans (echoed by Fox News commentators) have achieved levels of self-parody far too exaggerated for a "Saturday Night Live" sketch. Everyone understands that politicians of both parties sometimes stooge for corporations. But Haley Barbour, Michele Bachmann and Joe Barton, among others, have said things about the British oil giant -- and the $20 billion escrow fund to compensate Deepwater Horizon damages -- that could only be uttered by someone truly stupid. Or someone who thinks the rest of us are truly stupid.
--snip--
Then there is Bachmann, who represents a district in Minnesota and therefore cannot be excused for standing up on behalf of a regional economic interest. To her, the escrow fund represents a scheme for "redistribution" of wealth -- as if the people who will receive money from it are undeserving welfare recipients and as if BP had done nothing to injure them. She derided the BP executives who will pay into the escrow account as "chumps."
All of these ultra-free-market, regulation-and-bureaucracy-hating conservatives agree, by the way, that President Obama and the federal government are just as blameworthy as BP, Halliburton and the other corporations in charge of Deepwater Horizon -- because federal agencies didn't regulate them stringently enough. Regulation is very, very bad, except when Obama doesn't do enough of it.
Today Bachmann backed off those remarks a step, perhaps realizing that she sounded even sillier than usual, and assured CNN that, contrary to appearances, she isn't just a "shill" for BP. But it may be too late for her self-correction and the phony apology-for-his-apology issued by Barton today as well. Their blather has ripped away the fashionable Tea Party mask of populism, allowing us to see something much more familiar underneath, and it is something that most American voters will find repulsive.
Read the whole thing.
UPDATE: This is Bachmann on the Mark Levin radio show just before Obama's speech aboout the oil spill claiming that the President has lost his mind:
"This fund is all about redistribution of wealth... it's beyond insane"
...and she even claims Michelle Obama has lost her mind:
"I even think it's madness this thing with the First Lady trying to limit people's salt consumption"
Mark Levin later says Senator Franken belongs in a psychiatric hospital...
Who's calling who crazy?
Listen:
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