An article on MediaBistro says that the Eisenstadt hoaxers did merely take credit for being Cameron’s source on Fox News, and I’ll man up and put an update at the top of this post to that effect.

But that still doesn’t absolve Fox from giving credence to what is clearly intra-Republican backstabbing and vicious rumor-mongering. If Palin was really that stupid, you’d think that “anonymous McCain aides” would come forward and testify openly so as to prevent her from ever running for anything again. The fact that they haven’t done so, and that plenty of other people — friends and enemies — who know her from more than a couple of bad interviews (namely, the voters and politicians of Alaska) say that she’s plenty smart, suggests to me that this is, as I said, merely a vicious rumor.

Anonymous sourcing is a first-class ticket to the sort of weasel politics we all should righteously despise, but nevertheless supposedly reputable institutions like the NYT or the Washington Post use it all too frequently against their political enemies. Shame on Fox for succumbing to the same racket.

Look, if we start to see things with nuance and shades of grey, like adults do, where’s there going to be room to conflate “Fox News fucked up yet again” with “all Obama-voting liberals are irredeemable idiots for having the unmitigated gall to trust that reporters are fulfilling their duty to our democracy in America, as members of the Fourth Estate, by telling the American people the truth”, while screaming “liberal bias” about a report from Fox, while unironically waving a copy of the (East Coast Liberal Elite) New York *$&@ Times to prove our point?

Confirmed *my* bias?

Who “broke” the “story”?

Fox News Channel.

Shorter B.L.: “Fox News was *clearly* in the tank for the Democrats.”

And putting “Country First”, no, I did not “want” to believe that somebody who was “this close” to being a heartbeat away from the Presidency would be such an idiot that she couldn’t comment on ANY possible definition of the “Bush Doctrine”, claimed foreign policy experience based on living “near” Canada across the water from Siberia, couldn’t name a newspaper or magazine she reads, said that the Iraq war was a “mission from God”, and just couldn’t seem to help herself when it came to her habit of pathological lying – any more than I’d “want” to believe that somebody who was almost a heartbeat away from the Presidency didn’t know what Africa was.

Good work on getting this mentioned, Mr. Lovely.

Instead, you chose to let it confirm your bias because it was what you *wanted* to be true.

“It also tells us that when a story looks too good to be true — when it perfectly confirms our pre-existing bias notions — that maybe we should treat it skeptically until we can verify it independently.”

The fact that the story was believable is what should scare the shit out of people.

The correct reaction in a non-fucked-beyond-belief America would have been “wait…a candidate for Vice President of the United States didn’t know that Africa wasn’t a country, but a continent containing many countries? No way. No flippin’ way that could be true. There’s just no way that could happen in the United States. Ridiculous.”

But instead, the reaction was “Geez. That Sarah Paliin is a real piece of work. We really dodged a bullet there.”

Says more about Palin (and McCain’s choice of her) than anything else. That the election was as close as it was speaks rather poorly of the intelligence of 47% of the population.

Fox.com reports that, regarding the reported Africa misconception, Palin said, “And never, ever did I talk about, well, gee, is it a country or is it a continent? I just don’t know about this issue. So I don’t know how they took our one discussion on Africa and turned that into what they turned it into … Along those same lines, of course, was the criticism that supposedly I didn’t know who the participants in NAFTA were.”

This account was recently backed up by Steve Biegun, a former Bush aid who was in charge of briefing Palin on national security issues. According to the National Review, Biegun says that there is no way that Palin didn’t know Africa was a continent, and whoever is saying she didn’t is distorting “a fumble of words.”

2) Exactly, assuming you already think Palin is an idiot. That’s why you should discount it: because you should be aware of confirmation bias and hold off on judgment until the rumor is proven true.