Michele Bachmann is continuing her campaign theme of celebrating Americana — even if the details are a bit more macabre than she intended.
“Before we get started, let’s all say ‘Happy Birthday’ to Elvis Presley today,” Bachmann said, kicking off a rally in Spartanburg, South Carolina, CNN reports.
“We played you a little bit of ‘Promised Land’ when we pulled up. You can’t do better than Elvis Presley, and we thought we would celebrate his birthday as we get started celebrating taking our country back to work.”
In fact, Elvis Presley was born on January 8, 1935. Today’s date, August 16, is the anniversary of his death in 1977 at age 42, likely caused by heart disease that was seriously exacerbated from prescription drug abuse.
The video is below the jump, courtesy of Politico:
This is not the first time Bachmann has mixed up some key details of American cultural history. When kicking off her campaign in Waterloo, Iowa, the town where was born, she boasted that the town was also the home of John Wayne. In fact, John Wayne’s parents had only lived there briefly, before he was born in far-away Winterset, Iowa.
And not only that, the town had previously been home to the notorious serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who was imprisoned for a sexual assault case that was committed during the years he lived there, before he later went on to commit over 30 murders in the Chicago area.
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Eric Kleefeld
Eric Kleefeld joined TPM as an intern for the final months of the 2006 midterm elections, and then kept showing up for work. His other interests include guitars, old comic books and the politics of various English-speaking countries.
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