There They Go Again

From WaPo:

In a post today on the ABC News site, Rhonda Schwartz and Brian Ross deliver a few details that upend a Nov. 1 Daily Caller story alleging that Menendez paid for sex in the Dominican Republic. That story consisted of interviews with two alleged prostitutes who attested to having conducted transactions with the senator.

It looks as if ABC News got the same spiel as the Daily Caller. In her story, Schwartz-Ross say that ABC News received back-to-back interviews with the Daily Caller with three women who leveled the allegations against Menendez. As the Washington Post reported yesterday, one of those women has recanted the story and says that the whole operation was an effort to frame Menendez and a friend and donor from Florida, Dr. Salomon Melgen.
Three bombshells from ABC News:

Bombshell No. 1: The recanter yesterday was identified as one Nexis de los Santos Santana. That’s news to ABC News:

In her interview with ABC News before the election, she said her name was Michelle Rodriguez and that she had come forward because Menendez had paid her only $100 of the $500 she had expected. She now says she was coached to make the claim.

Bombshell No. 2 (nuclear): From the story: “Asked during the interview with ABC News how she knew that the man named “Bob” was a United States Senator, one of the other women said she had put the name “Bob” into a web search site and a picture of Menendez popped up.” Here’s what came up on the Erik Wemple Blog’s computer when we searched on “Bob.”

Bombshell No. 3: ABC News reports a troubling degree of sameness among the women’s accounts: “Her account of sex with Menendez in the video interview was almost word-for-word the account given by two other women who were produced for interviews about having sex with the man they knew only as ‘Bob.’” In other words, there appears to have been some coaching involved here.

The ABC News story isn’t a game changer; it’s a game ender.

Nobody doesn't know that Bob Menendez has some trouble keeping to the straight-and-narrow; everybody knows there's a thing or three wrong with New Jersey politics, and everybody knows we have something of a pay-to-play system in effect in at least a good bunch of our government.

But in their absolute insistence on maintaining Centrist Orthodoxy, some of the Press Poodles swallowed the Fable of the Dominican Hookers like a...well, like a hooker swallows whatever a hooker gets paid to swallow.
It's classic.

• Menendez has a reputation, so anything that gets thrown his general direction will prob'ly stick as far as some folks are concerned. 
• some sleazoid lawyer gets paid to dish some dirt (ie: make shit up)
• the story starts out at Daily Caller (or WND or Drudge or whatever)
• it gets picked up by "the real news guys" 
• by the time it's debunked, the wingnuts have another Libtard Myth memorized and ready to drop into any conversation about any policy - and one they can pull out whenever one of their guys gets caught actually doing something shitty.

And in the meantime?  Bob's real problems are conveniently ignored, and we can all go back to being comfortably numb.

The good news is that ABC somehow managed to find it's own "center", and instead of going with the flow, they did a little thing (that we used to able to recognize) called "JOURNALISM".

In some ways - at least in some cases - the narrative is starting to change.

hat tip = Democratic Underground