The latest bizarre twist to the Michele Bachmann campaign, which has quickly devolved into the political equivalent of sticking a 7x7 blotter of bad acid directly to your eyeballs, involves recent claims she made linking HPV vaccines to mental retardation in young girls. Now Bachmann is backtracking, telling the AP — in a story titled, "Bachmann says vaccine retardation claim not hers" — that she was simply "relaying what a woman had said...I wasn't attesting to her accuracy. I wasn't attesting to anything."

Let's think about that for a second. Here is the original quote, spoken on Fox News:

"There's a woman who came up crying to me tonight after the debate. She said her daughter was given that vaccine. She told me her daughter suffered mental retardation as a result. There are very dangerous consequences."

So, if she wasn't attesting to the claim's accuracy, then what was she attesting to? Her ability to repeat things on national TV that complete strangers say to her? Hey, Michele: I once took a lot of Robitussin and stood in the mirror and I could swear that my nipples were smiling back at me. Cough syrup causes nipple-smiling! Go spread it on the mountain! I mean, I just said it, didn't I? [AP, photo via Getty]