How Many Quadrillion Imaginary Rupees Is That Anyway?

Eric Boehlert notes that the Drudge-tastic myth of President Obama's trip to India costing some two billion dollars is of course a complete lie, but that never stops the right wing smear machine from inflating the numbers now, does it?

The question for the mainstream press, as always, is how to deal with egregious falsehoods that take hold and quickly drive our political discourse. Sometimes I think the right-wing plan is to just drown everyone in so many lies that it becomes too time consuming for journalists to fact-check all the fabrications. And perhaps that's why so often the lies are not confronted.

Happily, the India trip lie is being forcefully knocked down from some mainstream media outlets such CNN and ABC News. And that’s exactly the right way to confront a misinformation campaign -- call it out for what it is. Don’t look away, or issue it’s-just-Rush-being-Rush type of passes to powerful pundits who can’t tell the truth. The correct thing to do is to say without apology, that these people are lying about the President of the United States, they don’t seem to care that they’re lying, and most likely they  know they’re lying. ($2 billion in security costs for a presidential visit? On what planet?)

Rachel Maddow brilliantly takes this on:



It was too much for some of the right wing blogs, apparently...but a pretty impressive number of them repeated this story without even bothering to question it.

Of course, what standard are they held to?