Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid may have suffered some bizarre facial
injuries but some of the most popular right-wing pundits are red-faced with
embarrassment after swallowing a phony story about how Reid was injured.

Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Breitbart, and Laura Ingraham were
all punked when they reported this month on the rumor that Larry Reid got drunk
on New Year’s Eve and beat up his senator-brother Harry, then showed up
intoxicated to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting with an injured hand and relayed
that he had just assaulted a family member.

The story was manufactured entirely in the mind of a
Las Vegas man who decided to test the bounds of the right-wing world’s disdain
for Reid. After some on the far right had speculated that Reid was beat up by
the mob, Larry Pfeifer invented his tall tale about the brotherly brawl.

A veteran of the Vegas night club industry, Pfeifer
created a pseudonym, Easton Elliott (the flip side of The Cars’
guitarist maybe?) and peddled the story to John Hinderaker, a conservative
blogger at Power Line.

Hinderaker ran with it. In response, as Raw Story summarizes the bizarre events, the right wing “went nuts.”

Six days later, Pfeifer was on Ingraham’s nationally syndicated radio show.
Limbaugh repeated the bogus story on his radio broadcast. Beck and Breitbart followed
suit.

Pfeifer told the Las Vegas Sun, which unearthed the scam,
that he thought the entire matter would be over “in about a day and a half.”

But, determined to discredit the Nevada senator’s story
that he hurt his face exercising with an elastic resistance band in his
bathroom at home, the conservative crowd bought the juicy story that Reid was
trying to keep things quiet about his brother/attacker.

Here’s how Raw Story describes the extent of the
punditocracy’s eagerness to dish dirt:

“Pfeifer points out he deliberately added points to his
story that would be easy to identify as false. … What’s more, when he leaked
the information to reporters, Pfeifer used a false name. But many of them
didn’t bother to verify his identity.

“In contrast, the
Las Vegas Sun ‘demanded that Pfeifer reveal his legal name
and show his driver’s license, then ran a public records check on him to verify
his identity.’

“‘Why are people so bloodthirsty?’ Pfeifer muses to Sun
reporters. ‘We’re all supposed to be good neighbors. Harry Reid’s a human
being. If a complete stranger we knew was injured, wouldn’t we be concerned?’”

And here is Harry Reid’s reaction:

I would hope that the senator understands the difference between Rush Limbaugh and journalism.