Hypocrisy, thy name is Bachmann!
Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn) gets today’s Golden Fleece Award for using nearly $14,000 in taxpayer money to fund a November Tea Party event in Washington DC.
Bachmann and other political opportunists fired up a group of teabaggers by railing against high taxes and out of control government spending and all along, they intended for taxpayers to pick up the Tea Party tab.
Expense reports from the November’s Tea Party rally in DC show that congressional money funded the event, with the money going to sound and staging equipment. Money was supplied to Bachmann’s rally by the taxpayer-funded accounts of Rep. Todd Akin (R-Miss), Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga), and Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa).
But the leaders of the Tea Party movement feel just scant remorse for wasting our tax dollars on assisting a bunch of lunatics with their conspiracy theories about death panels and elusive birth certificates:
Learning that taxpayer funds were used did strike a note of discomfort with Twin Cities Tea Party co-founder Deanna Boss, who arranged for more than 100 Minnesotans to attend the rally. Boss said she would have preferred that private donors had financed the event, given her and other activists’ criticism of excessive government spending.
While no laws were broken, sunlight remains the greatest disinfectant when it comes to discretionary spending by our representatives in DC. This was not only a highly partisan event, it was an event with no redeeming values. It was staged only to demean the President, discount the Democratic Party, and to spread vitriol across the country.
And, as a person who’s not a member of the Tea Party movement, I’m demanding that Reps. Bachmann, Akin, Price, and King, pay back the taxpayers their $13,600.
Happy Tax Day!
