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Saturday Night Live gave Congresswoman Michele Bachmann and CNN a bit of grief for her "tea party" response to the president's State of the Union Address. They could have done better by just airing Bachmann's actual speech since their parody wasn't nearly as creepy or bizarre as the real thing.

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Apparently David Gergen agreed with fellow CNN contributor Erick Erickson following Michele Bachmann's response to President Obama's State of the Union address that either Michele Bachmann or Paul Ryan had any factual information to share with us.

GERGEN: But I agree with Erick, she reinforced what Ryan said. She reinforced what Ryan said. She came at it a different way but provided a lot of facts and figures.

Facts and figures huh? Okay David. As I already linked in my post with Bachmann's speech, Media Matters' Political Correction decided to be a whole lot more responsible than CNN with fact-checking of Michele Bachmann. Granted they had a research team to put work before they had to weigh in on what Bachmann said, unlike the immediate response here, but don't tell me that these talking heads at CNN didn't realize that Bachmann was telling some obvious lies as well. And don't tell me that CNN could not have put a fact checking team together as quickly as Media Matters did if they wanted to. Since their management apparently doesn't care that they barely need to be one step above the right wing liars over at Fox, I'm sure they won't have any problems with what was said during this segment.

And you can't really say time is a factor with their lack of fact-checking on Bachmann since a day later, they're still getting it wrong.

Good thing we've got that "best political team on television" looking out for the rest of us, isn't it?

Here's a little more from Digby on this:

Bachman? Hilarious. I wonder if Palin is going to make fun of her odd use of the teleprompter.

But more hilarious than that was the response of the CNN gasbags, who said she reinforced Ryan's Reaganesque message, but (according to David Gergen) with more facts and figures. [...]

Meanwhile, gasbags everywhere were very concerned that Obama didn't concentrate more on deficit reduction and the obvious necessity to destroy Social Security and Medicare as soon as humanly possible. They seem to be on something of a crusade.

Here's more of the transcript via CNN of their round table pretending that they weren't giving a crazy lady air time by choosing to air Bachmann's SOTU response.

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CNN's John King asks his guests James Carville and Mary Matalin to fact check these statements by Michele Bachmann in her response to the State of the Union address yesterday.

BACHMANN: Well, what did we buy? Instead of a leaner, smarter government, we bought a bureaucracy that now tells us which lightbulbs to buy and which may put 16,500 IRS agents in charge of policing President Obama's health care bill.

King actually bothers to start pointing out that her statement about the IRS agents is just not true and when he asks Matalin to weigh in, she pulls out the pity card for Bachmann and claims that liberals are attacking her because they just want to shut her up. She also asserts that it's the Democrats that are propping her up on some equal footing with the president. Sorry Lady McCheney, but it's the tea partiers and your network that decided to do that when airing her response. I agree with your husband, keep her crazy ass out there talking.

They also never bothered to point out that it was George Bush, not Barack Obama that signed the energy bill that changed the standard on lightbulbs. Matalin was too busy pulling out the victim card for Bachmann.

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Bill Maher weighed in before yesterday's State of the Union address on CNN and had a few things to say about gun control after the tragic shootings in Arizona, the ridiculous "date night" seating arrangements, crying John Boehner, Michele Bachmann getting air time on CNN to respond to the SOTU and the continual move to the right by our politicians.

BLITZER: I'm told, Bill, that the president of the United States has decided, despite what happened in Tucson, he will not specifically talk about guns in his speech tonight. He's going to do that down the road in a future speech in a few weeks. But, tonight, the word gun is not going to be there. You think that's a mistake, don't you?

MAHER: Oh, I do. That's a real shame.

And it's always down the road. And it's always finding common ground with this president. And that common ground always seems to be the ground where the Republicans are already standing on. So, no, that's a real shame, because this was again an opportunity, similar to the opportunity Ronald Reagan had in 1981, when he was shot.

At a moment like that, maybe people would be willing to go along with a -- sort of a different point of view. Even Dick Cheney said that. Dick Cheney seems to be to the left of Barack Obama on the gun issue. So, I guess it's true. He has moved to the center.

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I think Jeremy Scahill summed this up pretty well on Twitter tonight. He suggested that SNL could just run Bachmann's "Tea Party" response to the State of the Union on its own, unedited. I couldn't agree more.

Our own Bluegal said someone else on Twitter thinks there are going to be a lot of GOP women using Sharpies as eyeliners now. And Susie Madrak thought she sounded like a librarian reading to her kids at story hour. I await the fact checking on her nonsense by others that have the time to do it, but for now, here she is in an appearance I hear was so rushed that they didn't even get her set up properly to be looking into the right camera for the CNN viewers.

And here she is preparing for her tea party response to the SOTU.

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UPDATE: It appears our friends over at Media Matters Political Correction had some time to fact check Bachmann's speech. Fact Checking Rep. Bachmann's "Tea Party Response" To The State Of The Union

Go read the whole thing since it looks like they put a lot of work into it including one of the first things that came to my mind when watching her which is The Washington Monthly's Steve Benen's bikini chart on jobs compared to Bachmann's chart tonight.

And here's more from Salon's Joan Walsh on both Ryan and Bachmann's responses tonight -- Why does the GOP hide its agenda?.

CNN has the transcript.

Good evening. My name is Congresswoman Michele Bachmann from Minnesota's 6th District.

I want to thank the Tea Party Express and Tea Party HD for inviting me to speak this evening. I'm here at their request and not to compete with the official Republican remarks.

The Tea Party is a dynamic force for good in our national conversation, and it's an honor for me to speak with you.

Two years ago, when Barack Obama became our president, unemployment was 7.8%, and our national debt stood at what seemed like a staggering $10.6 trillion. We wondered whether the president would cut spending, reduce the deficit and implement real job-creating policies.

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Somebody got on Tweety's bad side tonight... the Tea Party Express' Sal Russo. Joan Walsh didn't get a chance to say much during the segment but she has more here at Salon -- The skewering of Sal Russo:

Live by the Tea Party, die by the Tea Party. The GOP flack falls apart defending Michele Bachmann's slavery history

Poor Sal Russo. The Tea Party Express leader had a rough day. Booked on MSNBC's "Hardball" to discuss Michele Bachmann's upcoming State of the Union rebuttal, instead he found himself confronted by Bachmann's idiotic whitewash of American history in a speech in Iowa over the weekend.

Go read the rest for more on Bachmann's nonsense he was trying to defend, but I thought I'd share one more point she made during the interview and in her article about these astroturf teabaggers and who they really are.

It was hard to feel sorry for Russo, though: He's a mainstream Republican campaign consultant who's worked for everyone from Ronald Reagan to Christine Todd Whitman. He saw a future in the Tea Party, so he hitched his wagon to its "Express." His firm Russo Marsh and Associates paid itself millions for promoting the candidacies of Christine O'Donnell, Sharron Angle and Joe Miller -- three seats Republicans should have won but lost because Russo's candidates were crackpots. (Russo insists his firm does it for love, not money.) Now he's hyping Bachmann; it's the Tea Party Express that's sponsoring her speech opposite official GOP rebutter, Rising Star™ Paul Ryan. Maybe Russo is secretly working for the Democrats?

On "Hardball," I tried to meet Russo on his own terms and talk about the deficit. His former boss, Ronald Reagan, built up the largest peacetime budget deficit in history back in the day, and also signed the largest peacetime tax increase. Republican George W. Bush took over a $200 billion annual budget surplus left by Democrat Bill Clinton, and handed President Obama a $1.2 trillion annual deficit. Where was Russo's Tea Party movement when Republicans were looting the Treasury?

Nowhere to be found. Russo and his buddy Dick Armey and the rest of them didn't have a reason to be busing them to town halls when Republicans were busting the budget.

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Oh my... George Will doesn't think Supreme Court Justices should be attending the State of the Union address because it's just going to be a "pep rally" where they might get their "erogenous zone" stroked. Somehow I doubt he has the same concerns about them attending Koch Brothers' retreats.

AMANPOUR: That was President Obama delivering last year's State of the Union address. Welcome back. Joined again by our roundtable.

George, I know that you have a great, great regard for watching the State of the Union on television.

WILL: A, they're overrated. The next morning, the country is still a complex continental country with muscular interests and politics is its own momentum.

Between Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson, no one delivered this in person. They sent their report to Congress in writing. But now we've turned this into this panorama in which -- in an interminable speech, every president, regardless of party, tries to stroke every erogenous zone in electorate.

AMANPOUR: Oh, my goodness.

WILL: And it becomes a political pep rally, to use the phrase of Chief Justice Roberts last year. If it's going to be a pep rally, with the president's supporters or whatever party standing up and braying approval, and histrionic pouting on the part of the other, then it's no place for the judiciary, it's no place for the uniformed military, and it's no place for non-adolescent legislators.