Former Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann is accusing the nation’s first black president of “waving a tar baby in the air” over his proposed crackdown on oil speculators.

On Tuesday, President Barack Obama proposed measures that would give regulators more power to limit manipulation of the oil markets.

“We can’t afford a situation where some speculators can reap millions while millions of American families get the short end of the stick,” he told reporters.

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During a recent interview with the blog Shark Tank, Bachmann insisted that new legislation wasn’t necessary because Obama “already has the tools and he knows it.”

“So, if there is a problem then president Obama is the problem for failing to utilize these tools that he has,” she continued.

“This is just about waving a tar baby in the air and saying that something else is the problem. I have never seen a more irresponsible president who is infantile in the way that he continually blames everybody else for his failure to, first, diagnose the problem and, second, to address the problem. It’s always everyone else’s fault.”

Bachmann concluded: “The president is a complete and utter fraud and a hypocrite on this issue, with all due respect to the president.”

As The Hill noted, Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-CO) apologized last year after he said that dealing with the president was “like touching a tar baby.”

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The concept of a “tar baby” originated in African folklore and was popularized by one of Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories published in 1881. In its original context, the term means “something used to entrap a person” but has also been used as a derogatory term for black people.

Watch this video from Shark Tank, uploaded April 19, 2012.

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— with earlier reporting by Eric W. Dolan

(h/t: Video Cafe)