O'KEEFE AND THE O'KEEFENIKS ACTUALLY BELIEVE THEIR OWN B.S. ABOUT THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA

You'll rarely read a story more satisfying than this one:

A woman who falsely claimed to The Washington Post that Roy Moore, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Alabama, impregnated her as a teenager appears to work with an organization that uses deceptive tactics to secretly record conversations in an effort to embarrass its targets....

The Post did not publish an article based on her unsubstantiated account. When Post reporters confronted her with inconsistencies in her story and an Internet posting that raised doubts about her motivations, she insisted that she was not working with any organization that targets journalists.

But on Monday morning, Post reporters saw her walking into the New York offices of Project Veritas....

It's a joy to watch one of James O'Keefe's saboteurs fail. You'll want to read every word. You'll want to watch the videos. Trust me.

But why did this happen? It happened because right-wingers have telling one another preposterous lies about the evils of the "lamestream media" for years, and now they fully believe them.

Here's how the failed sting was supposed to work:

In a series of interviews over two weeks, the woman shared a dramatic story about an alleged sexual relationship with Moore in 1992 that led to an abortion when she was 15. During the interviews, she repeatedly pressed Post reporters to give their opinions on the effects that her claims could have on Moore’s candidacy if she went public.

She tells a completely phony story about her past -- and assumes that one of the top newspapers in America won't even do a minimal amount of fact-checking to try to verify it. She also seems to assume that in the course of her conversations with Post reporters, one of them is going to blurt out something on the order of "Oh yeah, once we run this story, Roy Moore is going down. Woo-hoo! Win one for the resistance, baby!"

That's not just what O'Keefe et al. want -- it's what they think is reasonable to expect: that the Post will run any story that hurts a Republican, phony or not, because its reporters are nakedly biased, and that the reporters will openly display that bias in response to the slightest prodding.

The simplest explanation is that this is projection -- every right-wing media outlet regards itself as part of the Struggle, so conservatives assume that mainstream journalists are partisan lefties who feel the same way and flaunt their biases on the job. But even Fox News wouldn't be as cavalier about the facts as O'Keefe and company expect the Post to be.

These folks expect the mainstream press to be the cartoon villain everybody in their bubble says it is. They live in a fantasy world -- but they just got slapped in the face by reality.

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OR IN OTHER WORDS: What these people believe is that the mainstream media actually operates the way "Bernie Bernstein" does in the fake robocall that was heard in Alabama shortly after the first Roy Moore sex stories broke:

“Hi, this is Bernie Bernstein. I’m a reporter for The Washington Post calling to find out if anyone at this address is a female between the ages of 54 to 57 years old willing to make damaging remarks about candidate Roy Moore for a reward of between $5,000 and $7,000,” it said. “We will not be fully investigating these claims. However, we will make a written report.”

They don't think that's far-fetched at all.