Rich Casebolt — lying fool, or mendacious halfwit?

Lately, I’ve been featuring a series of lies being promulgated by Jim Hoft at ‘Gateway Pundit’. Clearly, he attracts like-minded lairs; as an especially putrid example, I give you Rich Casebolt.

Those who have followed the political scene in the past week know that John McCain told a whopper about the Anbar Awakening, crediting it to the troop surge that didn’t start until months afterwards. When he was called on this falsehood, McCain compounded his mendacity by claiming that whatever counterinsurgency tactics had been employed before the surge began were, in fact, part of the surge.

Rich Casebolt happily drank the McCain Kool-Aid. In the comments to a recent post on Gateway Pundit, he echoed McCain’s lies:

• McCain may have had the official dates wrong, but in practical terms the Surge had already started in 2006.
• The Surge had already started, well before its official announcement.
• So, one can say that the Surge started well before its official announcement…

I called Casebolt on his quick and facile adoption of the McCain lie, and he responded as wingnuts do: by utterly ignoring the facts, and continuing to insist that the lie was the truth. Only when I pointed out that no less a personage than General David Petraeus had stated categorically that the Anbar Awakening took place before the surge did Casebolt grudgingly acknowledge reality. Naturally, he tried to spin his lie as a mere “error”. It is telling that he adopted the revised surge timeline only after McCain tried to float it — as clear an indication that Casebolt was adopting the lie-of-convenience as one could hope for.

As I pointed out above, Rich Casebolt is merely one exemplar of the sort of far-right fringe whackaloon that inhabits the blogosphere in such numbers: ignorant, unreasoning, sure of his non-”facts”, and willing to lie prodigiously in the service of his stunted ideology. Alas, this sort will likely be with us for years. The best weapon against them, as always with the armies of ignorance, is the simple and forceful presentation of the facts.