AP editor: There wasn't enough time and space to debunk Bachmann lies

An editor for the Associated Press said in a panel discussion on Wednesday that during coverage of the Republican primaries, fact-checkers for the organization would have to limit themselves to a "quota" of misstatements by Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) during debates.

According to the Washington Post, the AP's Jim Drinkard confessed that the sheer volume of factually inaccurate assertions, dubious claims and stretchings of the truth threatened to "overload" the stories of the debates.

“We had to have a self-imposed Michele Bachmann quota in some of those debates," Drinkard told the audience at the National Press Club on Wednesday. Otherwise, Bachmann would have become the story. Of all the Republican candidates who ran, said Drinkard, "Often she was just more prone to statements that just didn’t add up.”

Some more famous Bachmann flubs include her claim that the HPV vaccine has dangerous side effects, including mental retardation and her assertion that Jimmy Carter was responsible for the swine flu epidemic of the 1970s.

Bachmann also claimed that former Speaker of the House Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) was drinking $100,000 worth of liquor on her taxpayer-funded private jet, and that President Obama's policies drove up grocery prices 29 percent between the 2010 and 2011 Memorial Day holiday weekends.

All of those statements were rated "False" or "Pants-on-Fire" by PolitiFact.

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