Mercury News editorial: Why don't Democrats just make stuff up too?

We tried. We really tried. We wanted to ignore Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing talk show buffoon, when he called college student Sandra Fluke a prostitute and a slut for arguing that health insurance should cover birth control. We suppressed the urge to snipe even at the forced nonapology he offered after advertisers started fleeing his show like johns from a sheriff's raid on a whorehouse. It was just Rush, after all, and nobody really defended him.

Until this week. Leave it to the gang at Fox News.

The accusation advanced by Eric Bolling on Tuesday's "The Five," and given credence by most others in the Fox discussion, is this: President Barack Obama put Fluke up to creating a controversy over the all-male congressional committee's failure to let her speak at a hearing on birth control. It was an insidious plot to distract attention from the economy -- wait, isn't the economy improving? -- and to shore up Obama's flagging support among women. Naturally, they will be flocking to the party that conducts all-male hearings on birth control.

Oh, come on. The Democrats aren't that clever. Only people used to concocting crap themselves would come up with a theory like this.

In fact, political rhetoric would be far more fair and balanced, not to mention entertaining, if liberals were better at the game of "make up stuff and repeat it so often that it takes on a life of its own" -- like Obama's AWOL birth certificate or George W. Bush's having staged the Sept. 11 attacks. (No, that wasn't a liberal canard; it was the wing-nut conspiracy theory crowd.)

full: http://www.mercurynews.com/editorials/ci_20133765