Blind wingnut "fact checkers"

Newly minted Democrat John Cole explains how you only have to worry about the wingnut fact checkers if you're not a wingnut.
The Suddenly Incurious Citizen Journalists

– When a 12 year old kid had the nerve to state that he benefited from a government program and thinks other kids should too, a massive orgy of ‘Truth detecting’ took place. Counters were examined. Houses were visited. Property records were scrutinized. Statements were parsed.
– When a private in the army wrote some tales with a few anecdotes about what he had experienced in the war in Iraq, and a few disagreed, no grain of sand was left unturned. Scale models of armored vehicles were built. Experts were called, emailed, and interrogated. Myspace accounts were looked up. Entire fields of Cray Supercomputers had to be brought online just to handle all the “debunking” and commentary from the wingnuts.

But now, a Republican front-runner FOR THE OFFICE OF PRESIDENT has clearly played fast and loose with the public’s money to hide/finance his extramarital dalliances, and the truth detectors on the right are silent. When an NRO columnist admits straight-up to making shit up to radically overstate a military threat to a key ally, perhaps to agitate for American military involvement, our fact-checkers snooze. The sum total of the response can be summed up as a giant yawn.

Go read the entire post. Even the often rational Captain Ed is guilty.

Allegedly misusing public funds to drive around your girlfriend and engage in all sort of accounting shell games to hide your behavior is, according to the Good Captain, no big deal. Can anyone imagine the stories if this was, say, Hillary Clinton instead of Giuliani? By now, they would be investigating all state and local laws to see if they could indict her for adultery. All together now- IOKIYAR.

Of course none of this is any surprise.

Update
Captain Ed "clarifies" his position a bit and I assuming the jab is directed at John Cole.

For the reading-comprehension challenged, there is nowhere in here where I say this is "no big deal". Clearly, the Giuliani camp has a problem here, one which I note in two ways they're not handling well. We already knew that Giuliani conducted a very public affair with Judith Nathan while married to Donna Hanover, and people have already factored that knowledge into the race. Newspapers and pundits have discussed that much since the beginning of the year.

This is different, and unless the Giuliani team quits issuing the threadbare rationalizations we've heard and starts making some reimbursements, it's going to sting. That's what I said above, and that's what I believe. If there's more after this, it's going to be a real problem for Rudy.

Incidentally, I should note that Josh Marshall at TPM has been doing a good job of going through the paperwork on this story. It's worth a long read, whatever your take on the story.