Bob Beckel: “Crackers And Right Wingers” Behind “Whitey” Smear!

Boy, the guy has a helluva nerve saying that. I wasn’t even going to touch the story, until I heard him talking about it on Fox News!:

Here he is today denouncing the spreading of the “Whitey smear” he helped perpetuate:

The cracker comment can be seen at LGF. I can’t get the video to embed, here.

Truth be told, most conservative bloggers presented the story as a rumor. I know I did, and I went back and forth for days, before I finally dismissed it because there were just too many inconsistencies in the story. I haven’t dismissed it out of hand, though. Frankly, I still think there’s a chance that it could be true, which to me, is one of the most devastating aspects of the rumor…that so many reasonable people actually believe Michelle Obama is capable of “railing against whitey”. But the fact of the matter is…conservative bloggers did not start the rumor!

Bob Beckel is certainly savvy enough to know that the “Whitey” rumor originated from the Pro-Hillary Democrat blogs, Texas Darlin, and No Quarter (earliest reportage May 15 that I could find) and it has been aggressively perpetuated by another pro-Hillary blog, Hillbuzz.

All of the big right wing bloggers have either presented it as an interesting rumor, or dismissed it entirely.

Hot Air has a list of the news organizations who have gotten this wrong, (by blaming conservative bloggers for the rumor) so far:

(1) Time magazine, (2) the New York Times, (3) the AP, (4) the Guardian, and now ABC. Not a single one has so much as mentioned Larry Johnson.

I agree with Ace. These aren’t all examples of media cluelessness, but deliberate lies.

UPDATE (June 16)::

This is the lead story at Michelle Malkin, this morning. As you can imagine…she’s not amused. She’s one of the leading righty bloggers who dismissed the story from the get-go.

UPDATE II:

Here is the part of the June 15 video with the Cracker comment:

I love how he claims he had tried to dispel the rumors in his earlier appearance. Bullcrap. He did no such thing. He’s the one who brought it up. Nobody even asked him about it. It just came out of thin air…”There is one other thing….”, and there was no attempt to dispel the rumor. In fact he stated that it was coming from multiple sources, and that it was worrying him.