Michele Bachmann Said One Stupid Thing, Didn't Say Other Stupid Thing

Here's your Michele Bachmann CrazyTrain update: Yes, she really did say that Teh Gheys want to abolish age-of-consent laws so they can rape children without consequences, but no, she did not say that the USA needs to open "Americanization camps" to make immigrant children work while they learn English. The former story was widely reported because it's yet another example of Michele Bachmann saying unhinged freaky shit, and the latter story was also widely reported because, although it was originally from the lame fake-news site that wasn't even The Onion, it sounded enough like another example of Michele Bachmann saying unhinged freaky shit.

And there goes another cherished cliché: You actually CAN make this shit up.

So, first the real thing: On a rightwing "radio show"/podcast last week (we are increasingly convinced that about 80% of this stuff is "radio" in online name only), Bachmann explained what the Gays are up to now:  

The Minnesota Republican warned that the gay community will “abolish age of consent laws, which means we will do away with statutory rape laws so that adults will be able to freely prey on little children sexually. That’s the deviance that we’re seeing embraced in our culture today.”

She also predicted that gay rights advocates will legalize polygamy and enact “hate speech laws across the United States” in order to bring about “the rise of tyranny.”

In other words, it was a day when Michele Bachmann was breathing a mix of oxygen and nitrogen. The only surprise is that she didn't also cite NAMBLA as a clear threat to Our Children.

The fake thing, on the other hand, was another dumb thing from the drearily non-funny "satire" site National Report, which apparently exists solely for the sake of trolling such stories, some of them more semi-plausible than others, for the sake of seeing whether anyone picks them up. It was also frequently attributed to KCTV7.com, which plagiarized the National Report story verbatim, with no attribution. Despite its name, "KCTV7" is not an actual TV news site -- it appears to have existed for about a week, and virtually everything on the site is plagiarized from other sources, usually without links ("Are they hiring?" asked now-jobless Benny Johnson ). Whoever runs the site has been busy copying and pasting; a RawStory piece posted Sunday said that KCTV7 "only contains four other stories, all of which were posted within two days of" the fake Bachmann story.

Now, there IS a real KCTV television station in Kansas City, but it's Channel 5 -- they're undoubtedly having a load of fun fielding this one (we decided to be a Real Pretend Journalist and give them a call, and we'll add an update when/if we hear back from them). Our prediction: because of the plagiarism and the similarity to a real TV station's call letters, "KCTV7.com" will be a dead link within the week.

The fake story claimed that Bachmann called for camps to be established in which immigrant children would

“spend half of their day working, and the other half learning what every child should learn, and that’s English, you know, English and American history. And as soon as they learn English with some degree of fluency, they can attend local schools, maybe with a voucher program, or something like that. And then they could work when they aren’t in school.”

Among the progressive blogs that ran with the story were Crooks and Liars,   Daily Kos, and Think Progress, all of which ran retractions; ThinkProgress also took the unusual step of striking-out every bit of the story:  
 

There's something to said for that approach, beyond just issuing a correction and retraction -- it feels like nuking the story from orbit, just to be sure.

And of course, the fact that three lefty blogs fell for a fake story on a hastily faked-up "news site" is proof that You Liberals Are All A Idiot, according to Dead Breitbart's Home For Excellents In Reporting, which is still pretty sure that a red checked shirtfound in Arizona is a "Muslim prayer rug." 

[ RawStory / National Report/ "KCTV7" ]