Michele Bachmann’s Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week

A string of misadventures for the congresswoman.

Times have been tough for Michele Bachmann these last few days.

First, her speech at CPAC featured several accusations that President Obama and the First Family are living a “lifestyle of excess” at the expense of the American taxpayer:

Her assertions, based on a self-published, unsourced book by a Republican lobbyist, failed to impress the Washington Post’s fact checker, which awarded her four Pinocchios.

In the same speech, Bachmann also claimed that Alzheimer’s disease could be cured if government regulation got out of the way, earning her a “Pants On Fire” award from Politifact.

Then, CNN’s Dana Bash confronted Bachmann on camera about the distortions, and the exchange turned into an unintentionally hilarious walk-and-talk that could easily be used for inspiration in an episode of next season’s House of Cards:

Video available at: http://youtube.com/watch?v=187LhhWremk.

This caught the attention of Fox News star Bill O’Reilly, who reached out to Bachmann’s people for a chance to tell her side of the story within the friendly confines of The O’Reilly Factor. Bachmann passed, which turned out to be a big mistake:

Video available at: http://buzzfeed-video1.s3.amazonaws.com/video/2013/03/21/billOmichelle-502x376.mp4.

Does a conservative politician who has lost almost all political juice after a spectacularly bad presidential run, and who now won’t even defend her positions on Fox News, have any other place to go but up?