Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry. and Barack Obama are on bus tours in “the heartland” this week trying to convince Americans that they can be trusted to do all the right things to solve America’s problems. Bachmann and Perry are obviously wary of each other in the way two people on the same team discredit each other because they both want desperately to be the high scorer, and each criticizes the performance of the other while trying not to stray from the Tea Party litany of beliefs about taxes and social programs. They are working hard to make the case that Barack Obama is a dangerous socialist and that they are adamantly against anything that smacks of socialism. Bachmann and Perry, like other Tea Party Republicans swear that they have never taken a dime from any government social program. It would be interesting to know if either has ever deducted interest paid on a home mortgage, or if they ever applied for and secured a student loan. Both of those social programs were introduced to give Americans an opportunity to get ahead. Both are programs that fall clearly within the category of the socialism which Tea Party folks claim to despise. There can be only two possibilities: those who have taken the deduction for home mortgage interest and have participated in the student loan program while claiming to hate all socialism are either ignorant or hypocrites. My guess is that it’s a combination of both those conditions.