Et Tu, Michele Bachmann?

GOP presidential candidate Michele Bachmann has joined Mitt Romney and his new sidekick Tim Pawlenty in hitting Rick Perry for his comments on Social Security:

Without naming names but clearly targeting Rick Perry, Rep. Michele Bachmann told Radio Iowa that lawmakers have to “keep faith” with current Social Security beneficiaries.

Said Bachmann: “That’s wrong for any candidate to make senior citizens believe that they should be nervous about something they have come to count on. We need not do that, but I think at the same time we also outline our positive solutions. That’s what I’m trying to do.”

But Bachmann will end up having to answer for her own past comments on the subject:

During an interview with the Fox Business channel in February 2010, Bachmann, a Republican representative from Minnesota, called Social Security’s structure “a tremendous fraud” and said that anyone who ran a business modeled after the program would be “thrown in jail.”

“It’s a tremendous fraud,” Bachmann told Fox Business host David Asman after he called the program “one of the biggest frauds ever perpetrated on the American public.”

“No company could get away with this, they’d be thrown in jail if they ever tried to do what the federal government did with people’s Social Security money,” Bachmann said. “What we need to do very quickly is take the money that is coming in for Social Security, and truly lock it up so that we aren’t putting it out the door anymore.”

Bachmann spokeswoman Alice Stewart did not immediately return a request from The Ticket for comment.

Question: Did Mitt Romney plagiarize Michele Bachmann when he wrote the following?

What would happen to the bankers responsible for misusing the money? They would go to jail. But what has happened to the people responsible for the looming bankruptcy of Social Security? They keep returning to Congress every two years.”

Or did Bachmann lift her comments from Romney?

Not that it matters much either way, since both Bachmann and Romney have now been exposed by their own words to be opportunistic flippers.

I’m sure that wasn’t Perry’s plan when he made his initial remarks on Social Security. But it’s certainly an interesting side effect.