You knew it was only a matter of time before this happened, right? Reporters are dashing around Presidential candidate Michelle Bachmann’s history like they just got off the plane at Wasilla. They’re rabid. The effort to destroy Michelle Bachmann is on.

There’s talk already about the horror of her husband trying to cure gays. Aaaah!!! There’s talk that she once worked for a professor who advocated a theocracy. Eeeek!!! There’s an old police report Bachmann filed when she felt two lesbians cornered her in a public bathroom. Ick!

Oh yeah, it’s getting ugly.

But as nuts as the media is going to go over Bachmann, going after Bachmann’s foster care seems a bit over the line, doesn’t it? But not to the media.

Michelle Goldberg, writing for the Daily Beast, claims that Bachmann is a big fat liar and she’s waaaaaaay stretching the truth about caring for children as a foster parent. She writes:

Bachmann often says she has “raised” 23 foster children. That may be a bit of a stretch. According to the Minnesota Department of Human Services, Bachmann’s license, which she had for 7 1/2 years, allowed her to care for up to three children at a time. According to Kris Harvieux, a former senior social worker in the foster-care system in Bachmann’s county, some placements were almost certainly short term. “Some of them you have for a week. Some of them you have for three years, some you have for six months,” says Harvieux, who also served as a foster parent herself. “She makes it sound like she got them at birth and raised them to adulthood, but that’s not true.”

When did Bachmann say that she’d got these children at birth and raised them to adulthood? In fact, most people understand how foster care works. And most people understand it’s pretty darn difficult and you’re dealing with children who probably have been through some pretty rough stuff. But no compliments for Bachmann opening her house to troubled kids.

In fact Salon.com wonders if her motivation was altogether different.

(However many she has at a time, foster kids are a good way to make some tax-free cash from the Minnesota government, and they’re not even Bachmann’s sole source of free government cash.)

Yeah, Bachmann was doing the whole foster care thing as a cash grab.

Seriously? What is wrong with these people.

So here’s the question. How soon until some reporter makes a big ol’ splash with some tale from one of these kids? How soon until these reporters start trolling the streets of Minnesota like the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang looking for some foster care dirt on Bachmann?

How much you want to bet that in the next month one of these “news sources” will publish some kind of tale of horror about Bachmann from a troubled kid?

Update: Here’s the scene of the Child Catcher that still scares the heck out of me even today. Maybe even more so now.