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Sarah Palin famously announced her debate strategy when she told Gwen Ifill that she only going to answer questions she wanted to answer during the Vice Presidential Debate in 2008:
And I may not answer the questions that either the moderator or you want to hear....
It appears Michele Bachmann has decided that whatever worked for Palin should work for her. She for the most part ignored or didn't answer Gregory's questions on MTP. She did come prepared with a visual aid however, a little hand held sign which had 105,464,000,000 written on it, signifying the $105 billion she claimed was "hidden" in the "Obamacare" legislation to fund the program. So she thinks that legislation shouldn't include how it would be funded? If not, what exactly were the Republicans threatening to defund? Undeterred by details, she immediately and proudly held up her prop for Gregory and the viewers to see.
She knew her talking points and kept repeating the number over and over again for almost two minutes until Gregory finally got annoyed with her.
MR. GREGORY: Congresswoman, you've made, you've made your point.
Crazytown Bachmann didn't fall in line with her tea party comrades and didn't bash Boehner as ineffectual as Speaker of the House, but finally addressed the question about the debt ceiling and said she was against raising it, which is the FOX News Judge Napolitano's position.
MR. GREGORY: The, the speaker has said that it would be irresponsible not to raise the debt limit, as will be called for soon. Will you agree with him on that and do that?
REP. BACHMANN: I am not in favor of raising the debt ceiling. In the last 10 years we have raised the debt ceiling 10 times. We are just giving the Congress a license to keep on spending.
C&Lers understand that the US would probably collapse if the debt ceiling is not raised.
Gregory tried to get her to reply to the WSJ's analysis of their own poll which said this about the Tea Party:
"`It may be hard to understand why someone would try to jump off a cliff' to solve the debt crisis, [pollster] Mr. [Bill] McInturff said of his fellow Republicans, `unless you understand that they are being chased by a tiger, and that tiger is the tea party.'" Is the tea party chasing the broader GOP off the cliff?
Bachmann's word salad response was that the tea party was made up of a broad-base coalition of people, not right and left and the Left is just afraid of it. No answer there.
REP. BACHMANN: You know, I think that the political left has been very afraid of the tea party movement because it is not necessarily political. It's not Democrats or Republicans. It's made up of a very broad-based coalition....
Then Gregory switched to foreign policy questions and I was waiting for her to hold up her sign again so that she didn't have to speak and make more of a fool of herself than she already had. Like Palin and Bush, when you don't know what to say about war or worldly events, just mention the great Petraeus.
MR. GREGORY: But, Congresswoman, my, my question, my question, is it in America's vital interest to remove Moammar Gadhafi from power?
REP. BACHMANN: Well, that, that question, I think, is one that, as, as Defense Secretary Gates has said, we need to be very careful about putting an army on the ground in the Middle East. We are extended now in Afghanistan and Iraq, and I think for us to consider further penetration at this time, we need to listen to General Petraeus and what he has to say.
Do I need to say anything about her gasoline ignorance?
Just consider, the day before the president took office gasoline was $1.83 a gallon. There are places today in the United States where it is over $4 a gallon.
The instability in the Middle East never affects oil prices, it's just Obamacare, people.
