Conservative pontificators are always recycled on TV no matter how ridiculous and petty they are. Tucker Carlson left CNN to start an even worse show on MSNBC after Bush was reelected that failed pretty quickly. Anyway, he soon jumped on the web and started the Daily Caller to be part of the online revolution. His site is quickly becoming a reflection of his own failed pundit career.
See, truth and facts do not matter. Greg Sargent details their latest atrocity.
Not sure I’ve ever seen anything quite like this before.
As you may have heard, the Daily Caller took a terrible hit yesterday after falsely reporting that the Environmental Protection Agency is looking to hire 230,000 new “bureaucrats” — at a cost of $21 billion! — to implement new climate rules. The tale quickly went viral on the right as the latest example of Obama overreach and government run amok, and the fact that the tale was comically absurd on its face didn’t seem to slow the frenzy.
But now the Daily Caller is doubling down on the story, and the argument it’s making in its own defense is really something to behold.
To back up: As Kate Sheppard noted yesterday in her post debunking the original Daily Caller story, there are only 17,000 employees at the EPA, which alone makes the Daily Caller’s claim ridiculous. Not only that, but the legal brief that formed the basis for the Daily Caller story was actually pointing to the 230,000 new employees as a theoretical outcome to be avoided. That is, EPA was arguing that the high number of new employees would be necessary if the agency didn’t have a so-called “tailoring rule.” This rule, which actually restricts the EPA’s regulatory powers to limiting emissions from the largest greenhouse gas producers, is being challenged in court, and EPA is trying to defend it.
Case closed, right? Well, no, of course not.
Today, in response to the criticism, Daily Caller executive editor David Martosko said the publication is standing by the story:
“The EPA is well-known for expanding its reach, especially regarding greenhouse gas emissions. What’s ‘comically wrong’ is the idea that half of Washington won’t admit it. The EPA’s own court filing speaks volumes,” Martosko said in an email.
“What’s more likely: that the Obama administration’s EPA wants to limit its own power, or that it’s interested in dramatically increasing its reach and budget? Anyone who has spent more than a few months in Washington knows the answer,” he added.
This truly is low comedy. The Daily Caller is now claiming that the original tall tale is true, simply because, well, the government regulatory apparatus by definition wants to expand rapaciously in reach and power. Once it has been established that government regulation is inherently onerous and bad and relentlessly expansionary, literally any fact at all can be pressed into service to support that unshakable overarching truth — even facts that directly contradict it. Nothing else could possibly be true, and therefore, it isn’t.
This isn’t meant in a glib way. Recognizing the absolute irrelevance of the facts at hand is central to understanding what’s really going on in situations such as these. This is an old story, but you almost never see examples in which the cynicism is quite this brazen. In this sense, the Daily Caller really has revealed a larger truth, albeit not the one it intended.
So they make stuff up and then do what conservatives usually do, they continue to promote falsehoods. Their is no lie big enough for them not to try and ferment into a full-blown Villager story like Hot Air's (read: out of thin) idiotic "Ford Gate" lie that was debunked by Ford.
Breathless thread title at Hot Air reporting a piece from a columnist from the Detroit News web site :
“Ford pulls bailout-criticism ad after pressure from Obama administration”
Much talk about about phone calls and pressure from the WH to pull a Ford ad talking about Ford not taking a bailout. Comments follow about Big Brother’s control of private industry. Great story, but it turns out to be BS as the Hot Air updates admit:
Update: Ford is responding on its Facebook page that it didn’t pull the ad under pressure, but instead had it rotate out normally. That doesn’t explain why Ford pulled it from its YouTube account, though.
Update II: Actually, it appears that Ford deleted the ad and then reposted it on Friday, for some reason, where it now has only 305 views.
Or the Solyndra nontroversy garbage:
David Roberts at Grist has a great overview today of the Solyndra nontroversy, based partly on recent polling and focus groups. The upshot? Support for solar energy remains strong even among conservatives, and the non-scandal "scandal" is basically confined to the Fox News nuts:...read on.
The truth is that it is (it's a legal case, click the link to read the explanation),the Daily Caller has been shown to be pathetic fools --- and Tucker Carlson and his minions, like the petulant children they are, refuse to admit they were wrong.
Recall this sad little episode back in the day when Carlson would pollute the airwaves on a regular basis. That anecdote was almost certainly a total lie from beginning to end.
EDITOR'S NOTE: "Journalists" make corrections, propagandists make things up.
