Minnesota congresswoman and former Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann used her rock-star status at the 2012 Conservative Political Action Conference to warn right-leaning Americans about what she said was a dangerous Obama administration foreign policy.
Bachmann, who entered to a standing ovation, began with a few jokes about her failed presidential candidacy. She called it an educational experience, where she learned three crucial things: where John Wayne was born, what day Elvis Presley was born, and — to always remember her third point.
“I thought you would be interested in knowing that running for president of the United States is really one series of humiliations after another,” she told the crowd before aiming her rhetorical cannons squarely at the Obama White House.
“This fall, President Obama will be pointing to his foreign policy successes in order to make the case for his successful re-election,” Bachmann began.
She said Obama would take credit for successes abroad, including the killing of Osama bin Laden, the overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi, and the Arab Spring in the Middle East.
“These are tactical successes,” Bachmann conceded, before adding that they “don’t begin to compare to the mess that Barack Obama has made of the Middle East and the strategic foreign policy blunders he’s committed.”
“Because, you see, a president’s foreign policy changes the course of history.” (RELATED: More on Michele Bachmann)
Bachmann also charged Obama with facilitating the rise of Jihad in the Middle East and failing to stand with Israel, a long-time U.S. ally. She attacked Obama’s choice to invite prominent members of the Muslim Brotherhood to his speech in Cairo at the beginning of his presidency.
Bachmann blamed Obama’s action-starved Middle East policy for the Muslim Brotherhood’s ascendancy in Egypt, which could lead to the demise of a thirty-year Egypt–Israel peace treaty.
Obama is the only president who has “failed to stand by our ally Israel,” Bachmann said.
Blasting the administration for what she called a lack of action on an Iranian nation with nuclear ambitions, the congresswoman challenged Obama’s “bad case of misplaced priorities”
“The president,” she said, “thinks that Israel building apartment buildings on her own land is worse than Iran getting a nuclear bomb.”
Bachmann also made room in her speech to hint at what conservatives see as Obama’s war on religion.
“Before Obama was elected,” Bachmann said, “no one had ever head of a United States president saying to the world that the United States is not a Judeo-Christian nation. I’m here to say we are.”
