You Oughta Know

by digby

Poor, poor Republicans. They are reduced to dragging out that poor old fossilized 90s retread Drudge to falsely smear Democrats again. (Geez, next they’ll be starting flame wars on usenet!) That’s a sad comment on the rightwing blogosphere if you ask me.

Old Drudge has found out today, however, that things don’t work quite the same way as they did back in the good old days of “Mad About You” and the screeching harpies of the Barbizon school of blond former prosecutors. Drudge got a letter this morning from the DNC’s lawyer for libeling Howard Dean yesterday and took down his false story.

And later today there was this:

Matt Drudge is looking for any excuse to smear Al Gore and his new movie, An Inconvenient Truth. He’s been running this story, unsourced, all day:

Burn: Gore and entourage took 5 cars to travel the 500 yards from hotel to screening of global warming pic in Cannes.

ThinkProgress contacted Gore’s representatives, who unequivocally confirmed that Al Gore and his associates walked from the Majestic Hotel to the screening at Cannes. Further, Paramount has committed to making the entire tour promoting the film carbon neutral.

UPDATE: At 3:38 PM EST, about an hour after this post, Drudge yanked the smear on Gore from his site.

This is very reminiscent of another false story about Gore that the press refused to acknowledge was a GOP plant: that stupid canoe trip which, naturally, the Daily Howler has covered in depth.

They’re running the sad old Gore playbook, and some of the media is playing along like good little robots. But it won’t work like it did before. You want to know why? Because there is a counter force to that little weasel Drudge and his fellow character assassins this time — us. Lefty bloggers will be all over the mainstream media if they do this again. We will ensure they get a snootfull of our vaunted liberal anger if they decide that “it’s just fun” to destroy Democrats on behalf of Republican thugs.

(And I’ll add that if a liberal Drudge comes along who works as a tool of the GOP sludge machine and is used to discredit the left blogosphere — wittingly or unwittingly — we will not take the bait. Chris Bowers at MYDD makes this argument explicitly, here.)

I liked the 90s as much as the next person. I tried ecstasy and bought that Alanis Morrisette album and everything. But that was a long time ago. The rightwing noise machine will not be allowed to entertain the boys and girls of the press corps with silly, trumped up bullshit like this ever again without a price being paid. The political media really need to think long and hard about who’s their daddy this time out.

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