The GOP's stupid chain: From GOP staffer, to Breitbart, to Rand Paul

Ha ha ha ha ha! As we found out earlier today, the GOP belief that Chuck Hagel had been on the payroll of an organization called "Friends of Hamas" crashed and burned when it turned out to be a bad joke that conservative morons took seriously.

Like their unshakable belief in "skewed polls", Republicans consistently cling to any craziness that validates their world view. And like their unskewed election results shocker, they don't appear ready to learn from their mistakes. They would much rather whine instead.

Opponents of Secretary of Defense nominee Chuck Hagel are fuming in the aftermath of sloppy work by their allies that has backfired and risks turning their cause into a joke.

The bumble: A thinly sourced claim that Hagel had taken money from a heretofore unheard of group called "Friends of Hamas," floated by the conservative website Breitbart.com, and sourced to Capitol Hill.

"This sort of thing drives me crazy because it undermines legitimate concerns about Sen. Hagel, his views and financial associations," said a Senate Republican aide involved with the anti-Hagel efforts. "In this business we deal in facts or the pursuit of facts and making up groups like the Friends of Hamas distracts us from legitimate questions as to what private foreign foundations and wealthy foreign individuals are contributing to the Atlantic Council or investing in Sen. Hagel's firms."

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! This Republican staffer thinks Republicans "deal in facts", when they gave up that ghost decades ago. Their entire campaign against Hagel has been nothing but one round of bullshit after another. Or put another way, there hasn't been a single "legitimate concern" floated against Hagel. The fact that one of their most fantastic conspiracy theories was exposed as (literally) a big joke only underscores how little they have against Hagel.

I mean, think about this: Some random GOPer staffer hears some random thing about "Friends of Hamas", and rather than research it (and discover that no such organization actually exists), he runs to Breitbart, which then runs it uncritically, again refusing to do any research.

Now, conservatives should know better than to trust anything Breitbart says, because, you know, they're Breitbart. They don't research or check facts (an actual fact). But no, the rest of conservative media then uncritically runs that ridiculous story. And not just their fringy outlets, but their supposedly respectable ones like the National Review and Lou Dobbs at Fox Business.

But the chain of stupid doesn't end with their bubble-creating media, as a U.S. SENATOR (Rand Paul!) then runs with the story, because like the rest of the conservative movement, he also lacks a single person able to check a fact.

Can't blame them, though. Facts do have a well-known liberal bias. If Republicans actually got around to checking theirs, they would be left with nothing else to work with. Which is why Breitbart continues to cling to its story.

"Our Senate source denies that Friedman is the source of this information," [Breitbart writer Ben] Shapiro wrote in a post that also referred to Friedman as a "hack." "'I have received this information from three separate sources, none of whom was Friedman,' the source said."