PolitiFact: Bachmann’s claims ‘false’ more often than any other politician

RAW STORY

Minnesota Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann isn't letting her lack of credibility get in the way of her presidential ambitions.

Only a day before the congresswoman's Friday visit to Iowa, the Pulitzer Prize-winning PolitiFact noted that she had made false statements more often than any public official.

"We have checked her 13 times, and seven of her claims to be false and six have been found to be ridiculously false," PolitiFact editor Bill Adair told Minnesota Public Radio.

He added that no other politician had been fact checked as often as Bachmann without saying something that was found to be true.

"I don't know anyone else that we have checked, more than a couple times, that has never earned anything above a false," Adair said. "She is unusual in that regard that she has never gotten a rating higher than false."

When PolitiFact last checked the congresswoman, they gave her a "Pants on fire" rating for claiming President Barack Obama wanted to give a "massive" tax hike to businesses with $250,000 in gross sales.

"We first fact-checked similar claims during the 2008 election, when Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, aka Joe the Plumber, worried he'd get a tax increase under Obama's plan if he bought a company that took in around $250,000 a year," PolitiFact noted.

"It wasn't true then, and it isn't true now," the fact checkers said.

PolitiFact's trove of Bachmann fibs just scratches the surface. Minnesota Public Radio found at least four false statements during their most recent nine-minute interview with her.

Frequent visits to Iowa are considered to be necessary for presidential candidates, and Bachmann has indicated she may enter the 2012 race.

Following the mass shooting in Tucson, Arizona that left six dead and Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) in the hospital, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) called out Bachmann for her use of gun rhetoric.

"I want people in Minnesota armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax because we need to fight back," Bachmann had said during an interview with WWTC 1280 AM in 2009.