For months, Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann has been an almost constant, outspoken presence on TV and radio talk shows, often lobbing rhetorical grenades that have delighted conservatives, infuriated liberals and raised her national profile far beyond Minnesota's Sixth Congressional District.
A few of Bachmann's zingers have backfired. But this week, one of her targets -- Minnesota Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison -- fired back.
Bachmann started the row last week when she said during a radio interview that the controversial "flying imams" -- six Muslim men removed from a plane at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport in a well-publicized incident in 2006 -- had come to the Twin Cities to attend Ellison's victory celebration after his initial election to Congress.
Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, replied Thursday that Bachmann was engaged in "psycho talk."
According to the transcript of an interview Bachmann gave to a San Francisco talk radio station on April 9, she said: "The imams, the imams, were actually attending, ah, Congressman Keith Ellison's victory celebration, when he won as a member of Congress." She then went on to detail the allegations made at the time about the behavior of the men.
Alerted by nervous passengers, crew members of a Phoenix-bound US Airways plane called airport police and had the men removed. The men were questioned for several hours before being released without being charged.
The six men were in the Twin Cities to attend a national conference of imams. Ellison, who had been elected a couple of weeks earlier, spoke at the conference.
Bachmann's comments were widely circulated on political blogs this week. They're only the most recent in a string of controversial Bachmann sound bites -- among them were her concerns that then-presidential candidate Barack Obama might harbor "anti-American views," that the president's economic policies amount to "economic Marxism" and that Minnesotans should be "armed and dangerous" (figuratively speaking, her office noted) to resist his plan to control greenhouse gas emissions.
