Sounding an awful lot like a presidential candidate (“I’m in”), Minnesota GOP Rep. Michele Bachmann came up with a novel solution for the budget crisis: Let Glenn Beck figure it out.

It was one highlight in what the Minnesota Independent (h/t Washington Monthly) describes as “one of her most fiery stump speeches to date,” to a Republican group in South Carolina. Given that her normal standard is flame-thrower it's remarkable the Palmetto State is still standing.

Bachmann is openly toying with a 2012 presidential run, and came about as close to declaring as one can get without declaring. According to the Independent, she closed her speech with:

And so now it’s for us. We decide. Do we go on? Or does the bubble burst? And I’ve made my decision. That’s why I’m here in South Carolina.

South Carolina is one of key early GOP presidential primary states.

Because I say the dream goes on. … And I’ve made a decision that I am all in to preserve the liberties to the latest generation.

All in indeed.

Bachmann is well known as one of the loopier members of Congress, even when she’s being more serious than I can only presume she was when she made the Beck suggestion regarding the budget deficit: “We need to simply tell people the facts, like Glenn Beck, with that chalkboard, that man can explain anything. I think if we give Glenn Beck the numbers, he can solve this.” [ See a roundup for cartoons about the budget and the deficit.]

Bachmann will not be elected president next year: The only president who came from the U.S. House was James Garfield (and even his case is arguable--Garfield won an open Senate seat but was elected president before ever being sworn in to the upper chamber); oh and her special wacky brand of politics also makes her unelectable. [ See a slide show of 10 GOP frontrunners for 2012.]

But as a window into the distilled viscera of the Tea Party movement, Bachmann speaking to the base is illuminating:

* Touting her credentials as a former federal tax lawyer, Bachmann predicted that today’s kids would pay 70 percent of their income in taxes. (That figure was 75 earlier this month, at CPAC--she's managing to cut taxes even before assuming the presidency; oh and the Washington Post said the assertion was completely bogus.) [ See editorial cartoons about the economy.]

* The U.S. has the “highest corporate income tax rate in the world.” (Not so, according to the Tax Foundation.) And the tax code itself is a "weapon of mass destruction."

* “The bureaucrats now hate our values; there’s a war on marriage, a war on family, a war on fertility all while funding and promoting abortion.” I don’t even know what a “war on fertility” is. At least she didn’t mention the horrors Michelle Obama is trying to inflict upon the country by promoting breastfeeding.

* “Our Peace Prize-winning president is very busy bowing these days to kings. … He is bending down to dictators, and he is brown-nosing the elites that are in Europe, and he’s babying the jihadists who are following Sharia-compliant terrorism.” The president brown-nosing in Europe--maybe she has respect for the office if not for the man? [ See photos of the Obamas abroad.]