Take a new lie from the Fox haters and track it down to its source. What could be more fun? With J$P Video!

There's an interesting phenomena among the Fox haters. When you spot one of them spouting some smear, you'll soon find others in lock-step. It's as if there were secret meetings, where they decide what their talking point of the day will be, and everybody plays their part.

But the truth is even simpler than that. In the anti-Fox echo chamber, all someone has to do is let off a rhetorical stink bomb. The noise machine wastes no time taking the bait, spreading the cock-and-bull story faster than you can say "slander". Case in point: Calling All Wingnuts, the home of one Mike Stark, who makes it his mission to recruit callers for radio shows to harrass hosts like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and, of course, Mr Bill O'Reilly. Stark says of the O'Reilly program:

Once you get through to the screener, give him an interesting talking point (liberal or conservative) but don’t try to get too cute.... It’s ok to disagree...they just want interesting comments.

That sounds fair enough, but it appears Stark is not that interested in an exchange of ideas:

if the screener asks you if you are one of those pesky Keith Olbermann callers… I’d feign complete ignorance - saying, “No - not Keith - I want to talk to Bill…”, or “Olber who?” or, “No - I’m a first time caller” or “No - I want to talk about (your talking point)”.... You say, “Hi Bill - thanks for taking my call…” or “Hi Bill - great show!” or some other platitude… The [sic] hit him with it: “You know Bill, I love Keith Olbermann.”

That will certainly raise the intellectual level of the discourse. Stark is a person of dubious credibility, since he has no scruples about lying and even encourages his armies of minions to do the same ("feel free to lie"). So nothing he says (including what he claims about his own calls) can be taken at face value. Just as well, given what he came up with today. He talks about his latest call to Hannity's show:

Then the screener came back on the line, sounding confused, and said, "Hey Mike - call me back tomorrow." I'm wondering if there is a little effort going on over at Fox - an effort to shut me out.

That would be a pretty neat trick, given that Sean Hannity's program is on ABC Radio, not Fox. Be that as it may, Mike's upset, because this time he was ready for Sean. He was going to talk about the high school teacher who compared Bush to Hitler, and he had this devastating, killer argument:

Gave the screener a good talking point - that the Colorado teacher was teaching a debate class - not geography as Hannity has been claiming.

Say what?!? Let's see:

• Washington Post: Jay Bennish warned his world geography class not to be taken in.
• The Rocky Mountain News: An embattled high school teacher — under fire for political comments made in a geography class...
• KOAA: An Overland High School geography teacher...
• The Denver Post: ...comments during a world geography class...
• WPVI: Jay Bennish is a geography teacher...
• The Denver Post: ...whether geography teacher Jay Bennish violated a policy...

No wonder the screener was unimpressed with Stark's killer argument. So what was the origin of this "debate class" nonsense? Just where did this lie get started? It took a while to track this down, but track it down we did:

During O'Reilly's show last night, the teacher's lawyer made it very clear that the teacher was leading a DEBATE class when he made the supposedly inflammatory remarks.

So who gets credit for inventing this fiction? None other than Marie-Therese from the Fox haters extraordinaire: the newshounds (another fine product of the Outfoxed mob). She went on:

That information was not revealed on Hannity & Colmes, who consistently referred to the tacher [sic] as a "geography" teacher.

Maybe because, according to every news source, he is a geography teacher. Ya think? But what of M-T's claim? Did Bennish's attorney tell Bill O'Reilly that Bennish taught debate? Let's go to the tivo [QuickTime video clip]:



It sure sounds like he said the class was "human geography"--not once, but twice (even though the class is actually "world geography"). So where did M-T get the idea that he taught a debate class? She made it up!

It turns out the mystery of who started this lie wasn't much of a mystery at all. The fact that it all led back to the newspoodles has to be the least surprising "surprise ending" in history.