A strange conception of the holy truth

In a piece last night by Dahlia Lithwick at Slate (via JMM), Lithwick takes on the current right-wing smears on Harold Koh, the Dean of Yale Law School whom President Obama has selected as legal advisor to the State Department, the complete absence of truth to the smears, including the the distortion that he wants to subordinate U.S. law to Sharia law, and fact that the right wing nutosphere led by Fox News and right-wing blogs effectively have been given carte blanche by the rest of the media to spread their nonsense.

Dahlia gets to the gist of the problem here:

There is no rest stop on the misinformation superhighway. Some senators apparently cannot be bothered to fact-check the claims they have read in the blogosphere. And that makes the rest of us responsible for fact-checking them as needed and for getting angry when good people are smeared for views they do not hold. One needn't read all of the thousands of pages Koh has written over his career to find an opinion or argument with which you disagree. But the fact that his critics must fabricate Koh's opinions in order to take issue with them suggests that they haven't read any of them.

Which is sadly typical of the right wing (and, as far as fact-checking goes, much of the other side, too, for shame). 

Yet, just as with respect to the non-existent Sin Express high-speed rail from Las Vegas to Los Angeles, or Michelle Bachmann's current absurdist fantasy about a plan to replace the U.S. dollar with a world currency, or myriad other examples, the right wing is simply not interested in the truth, but only in scoring points for scare tactics. It's not that they haven't read any of Koh's opinions, Dahlia, it's that they are not interested in his actual opinions.  

It's all about messaging. That, and destruction of the Obama administration. 

How about a Bill Moyers investigation?