You all remember how Jesse Watters of Fox News ambushed ThinkProgress's Amanda Terkel while she was on vacation. It was one of the more obscene examples of the routine violations of basic journalistic standards that Fox indulges when it sends out these ambush crews.

Well, a ThinkProgress writer caught up with Jesse while he was in the hallway at a right-wing gathering in D.C., and managed to turn the tables a bit. In the process, Watters just barefacedly lies on camera:

We pointed out to Watters that O’Reilly has said he always contacts people to give them a chance to respond before ambushing them. Watters attempted to stall several times before answering the question, but eventually responded:

WATTERS: We called her office.

Q: She said she got no call.

WATTERS: Yeah, no — I called her office twice.

Q: Who in the office did you call?

WATTERS: I called the main number.

Q: The main number?

WATTERS: Yeah, I called the main number and asked if Amanda Terkel was there.

Watters then began to say that he contacted Amanda Terkel “before we went after –” but stopped himself before finishing the sentence and instead said, “Yeah, before we went there.”

Watters is lying, just like he did when he claimed he contacted Hendrick Hertzberg before accosting him in New York City. No one at the Center for American Progress ever received a call from Jesse Watters or anyone else at Fox News about having Amanda appear on the show.

Watters previously had a little taste of turnabout. He deserves a whole lot more. Because karma is a bitch.

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Anyone notice how right-wing behavior toward President Obama so far is mimicking, structurally speaking, their behavior toward President Clinton in the 1990s: encourage anti-government hysteria, freak out about incipient totalitarianism, accuse him of destroying the country and making it weaker, and then constantly attack his appointees and demand their firing? What's next, an investigation of his investments?

Does it surprise anyone, then, that the first object of Republicans' ire -- the first Cabinet appointment whose resignation they're demanding -- would be a woman named Janet?

Greta Van Susteren and Byron York last night on Fox were fairly representative (check out the Limbaugh rant at the beginning), though the fire-Napolitano talk has been bubbling up everywhere. As Amanda Terkel notes this morning, John McCain even went so far as to falsely claim that the person responsible for the report had been fired.

Still, as York says, the cold reality is that Napolitano is on perfectly solid ground and there is no likelihood, imminent or otherwise, that she'll be forced out. But the reason for that is that not only was what the report said in fact perfectly accurate, she only bears glancing responsibility for it: It had, after all, been commissioned by the Bush administration and authored by Bush administration hirees.

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