Limbaugh defends Bachmann from right wing media attack

Made for each other.

​It's one thing for the mainstream media, or an alt weekly like City Pages, to call out Michele Bachmann for hypocrisy and political hackery. But it's another matter entirely when a conservative news website turns on one of its own and does the same thing.

That's why we raised an eyebrow at this Daily Caller headline: Michele Bachmann's record: Earmarks, farm subsidies and pardons?

So did Rush Limbaugh.

The ball got rolling when DC writer Matt Lewis published a hit job that aired some of the more egregious Bachmannisms we've been tracking for years.

Those pointy-headed Republican elitists should leave Michele Bachmann alone, Rush Limbaugh says.

​She casts herself as a fiscal conservative, but since joining the Congress in 2007, she's appropriated more than $3.7 million in earmarks.

From 1995-2009, the Bachmann Family Farm (still listed as being owned by her deceased father-in-law) has collected $259,332 in federal farm subsidies.

She may be "plagued" by her 2007 letter requesting a presidential pardon for a convicted drug-smuggler and money-launderer Frank Vennes.

And Bachmann is now on her fifth chief of staff in five years, and her high staff turnover "is a running joke on the Hill -- a nightmare," one Hill staffer told Lewis.

With talent on loan from God, hypocrisyLimbaugh went into high dudgeon yesterday.

There's a little game being played by the established Republican commentariat, what I call the inside-the-Beltway conservative intelligentsia, the Republican intellectual elite. It is aimed at muddling conservatism and discrediting, taking down, if you will, conservative Tea Party candidates in the Republican presidential primary process.

On and on he droned about poor Michele being under attack from the "ruling class" in Washington, who just can't stand her peerless conservative philosophy.

This is an attempt to alert the Tea Party that Michele Bachmann's a fraud, that she's really not one of you. She's out there trying to create support, command support from all you Tea Party people, but she's not one of you, she's not pure. ... On the big stuff, Michele Bachmann has flying colors when it comes to being defined as a conservative. It would be an incredible stretch to try to say that she's not a conservative.

But The Daily Caller piece wasn't questioning Bachmann's conservative cred. It was pointing out her hypocrisies -- a phrase Limbaugh never addressed during his tirade.

Previously:

• Mrs. Potatohead: Michele Bachmann cites Constitution to defend spuds
• Is Michele Bachmann smarter than a high school sophomore?
• Meet Amy Myers, the teen who challenged Michele Bachmann to a debate
• Bachmann named to Time's 'Most Influential' list
• Where Bachmann gets her money
• Michele Bachmann compares taxes to Holocaust