Tea Party doyenne Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) has made a career out of fringe thinking, and appearing on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 the day after this month’s election, she insisted that President Obama was spending $200 million a day at taxpayers’ expense on his trip to India — a whopping falsehood that was “repeated by nearly ever conservative pundit in the land: Hannity, Limbaugh, Beck, Drudge. Always with a healthy dose of indignation.”

However, organizations concerned with facts — such as ABC, the Wall Street Journal, Politifact, Factcheck.org, the Secret Service, and the Pentagon — summarily debunked Bachmann’s accusation as false and outlandish (for comparison, the war in Afghanistan costs about $190 million a day).

But now, her blatant untruth telling is chaffing even some of her conservative champions. In a follow up segment on Cooper’s show last night, conservative Red State blogger and CNN contributor Erick Erickson called Bachmann’s $200 million claim “absurd” and an affront to “commonsense.” Erickson added, “she probably should have come out and said she’s wrong”:

GUPTA: Eric, is this crazy, or is this calculated? I mean, it’s got a lot of people talking. And maybe she’s not quite ready for prime time, some of her colleagues are saying. What do you make of this?

ERICKSON: I think this goes beyond trying to keep politicians honest to going into the absurd. You know, I — I saw that report on November 2nd, during election night, while I was on studio in — at CNN. It was on The Drudge Report. She clicked through it. It was a media report out of India. It seemed like, when she was talking to Anderson about it on the 3rd, it seemed very clear she was basing her opinion based on that story, which was wrong, but was quoted all over the place. [...]

GUPTA: I — Erick, I — I get that. I understand that. But, look, I mean, is there a greater level of accountability that someone like her needs to have? $200 million a day, Erick, is what that unnamed official in the overseas wire article said….I mean, it — it doesn’t pass the commonsense test.

ERICKSON: You or I, Sanjay, wouldn’t have said it, but she did. You know, it — it doesn’t for you or for me, and I don’t think she should have said it. I think she probably should have come out and said she was wrong. But that was November 3rd, and — and she has moved on, and the rest of us haven’t.

Watch the segment (Erickson begins at 4:30):

While Erickson is correct in pointing out Bachmann’s absurdity, he is wrong in defending her by saying she has “moved on” from her claim. Two weeks after her “fact” withered under scrutiny, she is still refusing to back away from it, defending the claim in a BBC interview last week. What’s more, Bachmann took the opportunity to stand by another ridiculous charge she made in 2008 that President Obama is “very anti-American.” This McCarthyism, however, somehow strikes Erickson as “one billion percent on the money,” as he wrote on Red State today.

If a past filled with fantastical accusations is any indication, there’s no telling where she’ll stop now. After all, she has a rare Politifact “all-false/pants on fire” record to maintain. As Gupta, who was filling in for Cooper, put it last night, “many politicians say things for effect. And then they try to unsay them when someone puts them on the spot. But some do it more than others. And Ms. Bachmann, well, she seems to have a history.”

Since President Obama first took office, Republicans have stood lock-step in opposition to his legislative agenda. In March 2010, Republican senators waged a record number of filibusters for a two-year term – after just 14 months. Given the GOP’s dearth of ideas, it’s understandable that Rep. Peter King (R-NY) told radio host Bill Bennett that Republicans shouldn’t “lay out a complete agenda,” because it could become “a campaign issue.”

Despite their blanket rejection of virtually everything President Obama has proposed, many prominent conservative leaders have urged the GOP to develop a substantive agenda instead of simply accepting their “Party of No” label.

Yesterday, ThinkProgress caught up with RedState founder Erick Erickson and asked his thoughts on the “Party of No” moniker. Erickson took the GOP to task for clouding the issue. He advised them to “stop lying” about being the “Party of No” because “everyone knows you are”:

TP: They are saying, if you accuse them of being the party of no or not having ideas, they will say “oh no!”

Erickson: That’s such crap. Say you’re the “Party of No.” Of course you are. Everyone knows you are. Stop lying.

Watch it:

Yesterday, ThinkProgress noted that Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC) took to the conservative blog RedState to call out “blatant misinformation coming from otherwise well-meaning conservatives” about this year’s Census. “There have been calls to only partially fill out Census forms – even though that would be a direct violation of federal law,” wrote McHenry. RedState editor Erick Erickson, who recently became a CNN contributor, has joined McHenry in urging conservatives to fill out the Census because “it’s a Constitutional obligation.” But on his radio show yesterday, Erickson railed against the American Community Survey (ACS), a more-detailed supplemental survey conducted by the Census Bureau, saying that he would “pull out” his “wife’s shotgun” if someone tried to get him to fill it out:

ERICKSON: This is crazy. What gives the Commerce Department the right to ask me how often I flush my toilet? Or about going to work? I’m not filling out this form. I dare them to try and come throw me in jail. I dare them to. Pull out my wife’s shotgun and see how that little ACS twerp likes being scared at the door. They’re not going on my property. They can’t do that. They don’t have the legal right, and yet they’re trying.

Listen here:

According to the Census Bureau, response to the ACS “is required by law (Title 13 , United States Code, Sections 141, 193, and 221). The same law protects the confidentiality of the information.” Erickson basically repeated his comments on RedState this morning, complaining that “naturally the left is out today saying I was on the air advocating killing census workers.”

Yesterday, ThinkProgress highlighted a divide among Republicans about whether try to repeal part of the health care reform legislation or “the whole thing.” Hard right conservatives like Reps. Michele Bachmann (R-TN), Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) and Zach Wamp (R-TN) who say they’re “going to repeal the whole thing” and Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA) who told CNN he “does not want” to repeal everything in the bill. In an interview with Huffington Post’s Sam Stein yesterday, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, appeared to side with Gingrey in favor of only seeking partial repeal:

In a brief chat with the Huffington Post on Tuesday, National Republican Senatorial Committee chair John Cornyn (R-Tex.) implicitly acknowledged that Republicans are content with allowing some elements of Obama’s reform into law. And they’d generally ignore those elements when taking the fight to their Democrat opponents as November approaches.

“There is non-controversial stuff here like the preexisting conditions exclusion and those sorts of things,” the Texas Republican said. “Now we are not interested in repealing that. And that is frankly a distraction.”

What the GOP will work to repeal, Cornyn explained, are provisions that result in “tax increases on middle class families,” language that forced “an increase in the premium costs for people who have insurance now” and the “cuts to Medicare” included in the legislation.

Cornyn’s comments were called a “folly” by National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru, who said that “without perhaps realizing it, Cornyn has come out for tinkering at the edges of Obamacare.” Cornyn was also criticized on RedState. In response, Cornyn released a statement attempting to placate the full repealers:

Some media outlets have misrepresented my position on repealing and replacing the President’s $2.6 trillion health care bill. Make no mistake about it: I fully support repealing this Washington takeover of health care and replacing it with a bipartisan bill that lowers the cost of health care.

Republicans have long pointed out that there are areas of health care reform where there is bipartisan agreement. Yet, instead of working with Republicans to solve issues of bipartisan concern such as pre-existing condition exclusions, Democrats insisted on a purely partisan bill that included massive tax hikes, trillions of dollars in new taxpayer spending, and cuts to Medicare, while failing to address rising health care costs.

Cornyn’s statement hasn’t satisfied RedState’s Erick Erickson, who wrote that Cornyn had been “forced into renouncing his own words in favor of some mendacious messaging about bipartisan cooperation.” In another post, Erickson called on his readers to “send an army of conservatives to the Senate who will push back against John Cornyn.”