STFU Michele Bachmann

It’s no wonder Michele Bachmann likes the free market so much. She can bend supply and demand to her will.

How else to explain her bizarre claim to a South Carolina crowd, first reported by Politico yesterday, that: “Under President Bachmann you will see gasoline come down below $2 a gallon again”?

Usually, politicians manifest their dishonesty on gas prices as mere hints, implications or vague predictions about being able to bring down gas prices, and they are sensible enough not to say by exactly how much. This is because none of them can really determine the world market price of oil, a commodity that every country demands in bulk and that America doesn’t control. Bachmann not only promised to drop gas prices below $2 a gallon — “that will happen,” she said — she also didn’t try to explain how she would do it.

But — wait! — Bachmann has a fact that apparently makes her case: “The day that the president became president gasoline was $1.79 a gallon. Look what it is today.”

President Obama also took office amid a massive global economic shock that reduced demand for oil across the world. Prices — and carbon emissions — were down because people were burning less fossil fuel, not because of some brilliant Bush-era low-gas-price policy, unless you consider “entering a punishing global recession” to be a policy.

(Source: washingtonpostcom)