Congressional Liars Caught in the Act, Part I

Being a Democrat is never having to say you're sorry...

I'm on the road for the next two weeks and blogging will be a sometimes thing. But I'm beholden this evening to Power Line for today's two reasonably brief entries. The first involves the ongoing flap wherein a quartet of minority Congresspeople fabricated a story to slander Tea Party members protesting the then-just passed Pelosi-care bill. Most political junkies by now are familiar with the accusation made by said Congresspeople, viz., the Tea Partiers spat on them and hurled forth the N-word. As Power Line's Scott Johnson describes it:

On March 20 the McClatchy news organization faithfully served up the story peddled by Reps. Emanuel Cleaver, Andre Carson, John Lewis and Andre Carson: "Tea party protesters scream 'nigger' at black congressmen." There is just one problem with the congressmen's story and McClatchy's account of it: it didn't happen.

A bit after this baseless slander, prodded by readers, the WaPo ombudsman attempted to defend the integrity of the reporters who "reported" the "incident." The defense was lame and it didn't hold up. That irritated yours truly and I blogged on this not-so-deft sidestep in this entry and this one as well.

Looks like, no matter how hard they tried, no reporter could corroborate the incident.  Johnson concludes:

This alleged incident, fabricated by congressmen including one of the Democratic congressional leaders, is a scandal hiding in plain sight. Surely someone who reports on politics for a living will not want to leave it to Breitbart to blow the whistle on it.

C'mon, Scott. You know better than that. As you point out, the Congressmen in question have gone to ground and will lay low until the press loses interest, which it did the moment they found out they couldn't blame the Tea Partiers for something that never happened. The incident will drift out of coverage, the anti-Tea Party slanders will remain in the Nexis database to "confirm" the veracity of this lie for future researchers, and the Tea Partiers will stay smeared in history.

Scott does provide Andrew Breitbart's damning video in his post which should lay this story to rest for any remaining skeptics.

If the media ever wonder why they're losing audience and readers, it ain't the iPhone and the Internet, folks. In my day, the average journo longed for the fame of a best selling novelist. Since all of them now write fiction for a living, I'd think that dream has finally been fulfilled.