Michele Bachmann, interviewed by George Stephanopoulos Thursday morning about her potential 2012 presidential campaign:
STEPHANOPOULOS: You know, a sizable number of GOP primary voters still question President Obama's faith and citizenship. Can you just state very clearly that President Obama is a Christian and he is a citizen of the United States?
BACHMANN: Well that isn't for me to state. That's for the President to state, and I think that the president makes...
STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you believe it?
BACHMANN: When the president makes his statements I think they need to stand for their own.
STEPHANOPOULOS: But he has said it very clearly. I'm just wondering if you believe it?
BACHMANN: Well, I think we should take the president at his word.
STEPHANOPOULOS: But you can't say, you can't just sit there and declare that the president is a citizen and he is a Christian?
BACHMANN: You know, what I focus on today, George, is today is the two year anniversary of the stimulus program where we spent a trillion dollars to make sure that unemployment wouldn't go above eight percent. That's what I'm worried about, because the people of the sixth district of Minnesota are very concerned about job creation, and that's a lot more important than dealing with these other issues.
You'd think is the kind of thing that would get Bachmann laughed right off the national stage...but with a majority of GOP primary voters being birthers, it's the kind of thing that makes her a potential presidential candidate.
The strange thing about this is that it's really quite easy for a conservative to reject birther nonsense without losing credibility as a conservative -- just ask Jeff Flake, who swiftly dispensed with a question about the birther nonsense the other day.
But so long as the Bachmanns of the world refuse to plainly reject birtherism, they are going to continue to serve as a reminder of just how absolutely nutty much of the Republican Party has become.