(Update 1)

I never tire of seeing conservatives embarrass themselves like this. A small-time conservative radio jockey takes a tour of the White House, sees some dirty socialist books in the library, snaps a picture or two, and bolts to the Internet to tell all his friends how John McCain's retarded snears in 2008 about our president being a magical secret socialist were actually right.

One that apparently harbors grand plans to turn our country in the next Venezuela but must be biding his time since he hasn't really advocated a single socialist policy initiative since coming into office.

I've seen it everywhere today, it bounded to every corner of the right-wing echo chamber and will undoubtedly be repeated ad infinitum on Fox News, even though it was debunked within hours.

Contrary to the smear, the first lady who traditionally picks books for the White House library, didn't pick those books. It turns out that, according to the Washington Post's Stephen Lowman, they've been sitting on the shelf collecting dust for nearly half a century.

This ranks up there with the Department of Homeland Security report on the rise of right-wing extremism, written personally by Janet Napolitano of course, intended to demonize all conservatives in America and to politicize national security in some way.

Only the report turned out to be the sibling of an identical report on left-wing extremism, and both were ordered and written by the Bush administration.

Did the right ever apologize for smearing the Obama administration? Did the ranks of Fox News ever acknowledge that the report was a set piece on extremism in general, and that this report specifically examined militias, racists, and anti-government extremists like Timothy McVeigh, not Michelle Malkin and Bill O'Rielly?

Of course not.

Last year when a FreedomWorks executive – a corporate lobbying group that founded the "Tea Party" movement and largely funded the first national events with corporate money – stood before a crowd in the nation's capital, and blatantly lied about the crowd size, rather than fact-checking the obviously false claim that 2,000,000 people were in attendance (it was around 100,000), the right embraced the lie and accused the media of trying to coverup the size of their protest.

It seems likely that we'll see such a response to this conservative SNAFU. Someone who was hyper-partisan and only looking to inflict political damage on his "enemies" instead of debate and inform saw something he didn't really see, ran to the web to say things that weren't really true, and now we'll all spend the next few weeks paying the price in having to clean up his mess.

And it happens all of the time.

I don't blame Rob Port for making a mistake, I blame him for not doing even a minimal amount of research before launching a smear campaign against the first lady and the Obama administration.

I don't blame the FreedomWork's exec for lying his ass off – that's his job, it's what he is paid to do by the corporations that invented and initially controlled the Tea Party movement – I blame the gullible conservatives in the crowd for believing it, and I blame the Republicans on Fox News and in Congress that repeated the lie because they desperately wanted to believe was true.

And I do blame every moron that didn't read the DHS report on right-wing extremism before condemning it as a persecution of themselves – whereby normal conservatives associated themselves with real extremists like McVeigh out of sheer stupidity – and for not finding out where it came from and who wanted it written in the first place.

The common thread is that these conservatives place "winning" a (and starting) flame war over getting their facts straight. They care more about scoring political points with their base than revealing the truth, whatever it may be. In fact they don't care, if the truth doesn't suit their agenda, then it's not even the truth, it's bias and spin.

It's not just upsetting to see lies like this reach every corner of the planet within an hour, it's deeply embarrassing to know that the rest of the world sees this happen and probably thinks we're all dumb Americans because of it.

Thanks Republicans. Because what we all really need right now is to look even dumber in the eyes of the world.

Update: The DHS report on right-wing extremism that was pulled by the Obama administration has been available on my Scribd account since the day it was released.

The current economic and political climate has some similarities to the 1990s when rightwing extremism experienced a resurgence fueled largely by an economic recession, criticism about the outsourcing of jobs, and the perceived threat to U.S. power and sovereignty by other foreign powers.

During the 1990s, these issues contributed to the growth in the number of domestic rightwing terrorist and extremist groups and an increase in violent acts targeting government facilities, law enforcement officers, banks,
and infrastructure sectors

Not directly applicable to this situation, but I think the idea is clear.

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