Limbaugh & Co. make fools of themselves again

Conservative extremists of the Fox/Limbaugh persuasion hate Barack Obama so much, they’ll apparently believe anything, and everything, negative about the President that’s thrown their way. If it’s not supposed connections with terrorists, it’s a missing birth certificate, and so on. On Friday, Mighty Rush himself, along with the FoxNation Web site and all its little imitator rightwing Web sites, made fools of themselves – there’s no other way to say it – by pushing another anti-Obama fairy tale. The story was about a supposed thesis Obama wrote while at Harvard, in which he praised “the distribution of wealth” and other conservative bugaboos. Limbaugh and ultra-conservative bloggers pounced on the story, which originated at the Jumping in Pools blog, written by one Matthew Avitabile. Here’s the priceless part: at the bottom of the Jumping in Pools blog post, is a clearly marked “satire” tag. As the author of the satire, Avitabile told Media Matters, “Out of the 50,000 people who looked at it, only three had the good sense to contact me and see if it was true.” Needless to say, FoxNation and Limbaugh were not among those three. Also needless to say, neither Fox nor Rush have apologized for reporting the satire as truth. Does anyone else remember when conservatives were champions of “responsibility”?

This article appears in Oct 20-26, 2009.