Just to be clear, I am not saying she is dumb.

But why is it Michele Bachmann can’t ever seem to get the most basic facts straight.

Here’s her most recent flub.

On Tuesday in South Carolina, Bachmann took the stage and encouraged the crowd to say happy birthday to Elvis Presley. Happy Birthday!

Of course it was actually the 34th anniversary of Elvis’s death.

Oops. Again.

Taken on its own the flub is not a big deal — presumably knowing the date of Elvis’s birth and death is not a requirement for being president. People make mistakes.

However, this is simply the latest in a long (long) line of factual inaccuracies on Bachmann’s part and the cumulative effect is both tedious and disturbing.

Also unnecessary.

If it was just a one-off, or the result of a long day campaigning, that would be one (very understandable) thing. But it’s not. It’s a pattern and it backs up Ryan Lizza’s assessment in his long New Yorker profile last week that he’d “never seen a candidate so loose with facts.” And that’s the disturbing part. The sense one gets that facts are simply an annoyance for Bachmann and not to be taken seriously.

This is a ‘top tier’ GOP candidate for president. Also a woman candidate. There is very little I would like more at this stage of the election cycle than to turn on the TV and see a strong female candidate for president who isn’t constantly messing up their facts (be they large or small). Someone who actually seems capable of running the country. Regardless of their party.

Instead we get Michele Bachmann making dumb flubs that could be easily avoided by a simple Google. Get an intern. Geez. This is basic stuff. It’s not okay when Rachel Maddow does it and it’s not okay when Michele Bachmann does it.

And it’s definitely not okay for someone who is running for president to not at least surround themselves with people whose job it is to make sure they don’t always sound like an idiot.

Written by Glynnis MacNicol and published at Business Insider, August 17, 2011.

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