Stephen Colbert On Michele Bachmann

On the Colbert Report last night, Stephen Colbert did THIS 4 minute segment on Michele Bachmann's formal announcement that she is running for President.  The first couple minutes of this clip are pretty average.  But then Colbert begins discussing how Bachmann was mistaken when she asserted that she had the spirit of John Wayne because he was from her same home town in Iowa. It turns out that it wasn't the legendary actor John Wayne who was from her home town, but rather serial killer John Wayne Gacy.  "Like Gacy, people may think you're a clown," Colbert says. "But if they dig a little deeper, they'll find that you are deadly serious."

I thought this harmless, funny gaff was notable because just yesterday I'd watched THIS 5 minute clip in which Michele Bachmann insists to an incredulous George Stephanopoulos on Good Morning America that, "the Founding Fathers worked tirelessly to end slavery." She defended this assertion by repeatedly pointing to John Quincy Adams.  In fact, he was 9 years old in 1776, and was the son of Founding Father John Adams.  And of course many of the Founding Fathers, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, owned slaves themselves.