Matt Taibbi: The Low Post: The Scum Also Rises

Fox kicks off the witch-hunting season

"Are the American people ready for an elected president who was educated in a madrassa as a young boy and has not been forthcoming about his Muslim heritage?"

-- From Hannity.com, Monday night, long after the "madrassa" story had been debunked

Nearly two years before the next presidential election, we've already set the tone: Even the most outrageous media fictions about candidates are apparently going to go unpunished.

At least that was my thought, after watching last week's unfolding of the Obama-madrassa scandal -- the unofficial starting gun for the Great Slime Race, as the 2008 presidential campaign will someday be known. I found the entire affair puzzling. I know for sure that if I made a journalistic "mistake" of that magnitude, I'd be spending the rest of my life picking strawberries in the Siberian tundra. Most print journalists I know would expect the same thing; the legal ramifications alone of intentionally going to print with a story that missed by that much would guarantee that 80 cents out of every dollar you made for the next ten years would go to the victim of your libel. That's unless you're Tom Friedman and you can use congenital idiocy as a defense in court.