Both Palin and Bachmann are quite intelligent and well informed, even if one disagrees with their politics.
This is a very dangerous time. If you look at Iran and if you look at Pakistan and if you look at the links with Syria — because Iran is working through proxies like Syria, through Hezbollah, through Hamas — it seems that the table is being set for worldwide nuclear war against Israel. And if there’s anything that we know, President Obama has been more than willing to stand with Occupy Wall Street, but he hasn’t been willing to stand with Israel. Israel looks at President Obama and they do not see a friend.
CBS Republican Debate, 2011-11-12, quoted in Drum, Kevin (12 November 2011),
The “Great Society” has not worked and it’s put us into the modern welfare state. If you look at China, they don’t have food stamps. If you look at China, they’re in a very different situation. They save for their own retirement security… They don’t have the modern welfare state and China’s growing. And so what I would do is look at the programs that LBJ gave us with the Great Society and they’d be gone.
CBS Republican Debate, 2011-11-12, quoted in Sarlin, Benjy (12 November 2011
Mother Jones writes about Rep. Michele Bachmann’s, R-Minn., connections to Olive Tree Ministries, an evangelical Christian operation founded by a former Jew for Jesus and longtime friend of Bachmann’s named Jan Markell.
Olive Tree Ministries, based out of Maple Grove, Minn., produces a weekly radio show and a newsletter, and it is also obsessed with Israel because it believes we are living in the end times. Bachmann’s been on Markell’s radio show multiple times, attended an Olive Tree Ministries conference, and left a testimonial on its website. As MoJo says:
When Minneapolis’ City Pages first reported [6] on Bachmann’s relationship with Markell in 2005, the then-state senator denied any knowledge of Olive Tree Ministries. However, Markell tells Mother Jones that she’s known Bachmann off and on for 35 years, and says she spoke about Israel at Bachmann’s church in the late 1970s. “My hunch is that they misquoted her,” Markell says. “She’s been at my conference. Why she would have said [otherwise], I don’t know.”
When Bachmann was running for Congress in 2006, her official website bio said she was a member of the Salem Evangelical Lutheran Church of Stillwater, which belongs to the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod. WELS is one of the very conservative “confessional” Lutheran denominations that maintains that the “antichrist” is the pope. You know, the leader of the Catholic Church? That pope. WELS confirms that they still “identify this ‘Antichrist’ with the Papacy,” in case you’re curious.
Slate’s Dave Weigel has reported an audio recording of Bachmann praying for the notoriously anti-gay ministry You Can Run But You Can’t Hide, run by the radical preacher Bradlee Dean. Bachmann offered the prayer in 2006 (though the recording was uploaded in 2008). In it, Bachmann predicts, “We are in the last days,” and says, “The harvest is at hand” — a Biblical allusion to the Rapture when some believe God will take saved Christians from the earth and leave the non-believers to face several years of torment and tribulation before the second coming of Christ:
BACHMANN: Lord, the day is at hand. We are in the last days. You are a Jehovah God. We know that the times are in your hands. And we give them to you…The day is at hand, Lord, when your return will come nigh. Nothing is more important than bringing sheep into the fold. Than bringing new life into the kingdom…You have weeded that garden. The harvest is at hand.
