michele-bachmannRep. Michele Bachmann appeared on Christian talk radio station KKMS on Tuesday to discuss health care. Along the way, she praised protesters who turned out at town hall meetings and implied that Democrats who oppose health reform — including one woman who tussled with Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., last week — are responsible for references to Obama as Hitler.

“It was really a beautiful sight to behold,” Bachmann said of the often boisterous forums held throughout August. “This was not something that was generated or created by any political party because the people who come to these town halls aren’t necessarily Republicans, they are Democrats and independents.”

She continued, “In fact, the woman who took Barney Frank to task in his town hall, and she held up a picture of Obama as Hitler, she was a Democrat, so this isn’t just Democrat, Republican, independent.”

“This is about people saying ‘I don’t want the government to control my health care.’”

As the Washington Independent’s David Weigel noted last week, the woman with the Obama-Hitler poster was a member of the Lyndon LaRouche movement. Across the country LaRouche supporters are bringing Nazi imagery to town halls to oppose health care reform for many of the same (often misinformed) reasons Bachmann opposes health care reform.

“The LaRouche cultists oppose Obama’s plan because they think he’s trying to euthanize old people and the infirm,” writes Weigel. “They oppose it for one of the reasons that former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) oppose it, and they’re providing a lot of the ‘research’ for this smear.”

While Bachmann appears to be trying to tie Democrats to the Obama-Hitler protest signs, she forgets that the people carrying those signs are on her side.

LaRouche, who has run for president as a Democrat since 1976, hasn’t had the support of the party.

Conor Clarke of Atlantic Monthly explains: “LaRouche (whom I interviewed and profiled for the New Republic a few years ago, and who really doesn’t like me) has never been recognized by the Democratic Party, which won’t let him seat delegates at its conventions and has cited his ‘explicitly racist and anti-Semitic’ views as a reason for the ban.”

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