What Are They Smoking at Breitbart.com?

Breitbart.com's Big Hyperbole

August 31, 2012 - I am still saddened by the passing of the great Andrew Breitbart.

I am also saddened, however, by the lowering of journalistic quality within the Breitbart online empire since we lost the Big Man.

A weird example of the lowered quality comes to us today at Breitbart's Big Hollywood site, in a post weirdly titled "Clint Eastwood's RNC Speech Schools Late Night Comics." The first line of the post is not only weird as well, but patently false.

The post was centered around Clint Eastwood's talking-to-an-empty-chair-as-Obama performance at the Republican National Convention.

For some reason, the writer wrote that "The American media was stunned last night to see the first Obama jokes ever performed on National TV."  Wait: What?!?

While the American media might have been "stunned" by Eastwood's jokes about Obama, and that's probably an overstatement, I rather doubt that they were stunned because Eastwood's were "the first Obama jokes ever performed on National TV."

The reason for that is quite simple: They were NOT the first Obama jokes ever performed on National TV, as you see by the videos here.

Maybe they don't read Politico over at Breitbart World HQ. If they did, they might have remembered a post from January, 2012 that cited a study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs.

That study indicated that “Republican presidential hopefuls accounted for five of the top ten joke targets of leading late-night TV talk show hosts in 2011.”

That's no surprise, of course, but here IS a surprise: "Still, no one bore the brunt of late-night humor more than a Democrat - President Barack Obama - who had 342 jokes made at his expense. And it was Jay Leno who had the most fun at the president’s expense, ribbing Obama more than twice as often as David Letterman."  We ALL know this to be true, yet Breitbart.com said that Eastwood's performance at the RNC included "the first Obama jokes ever performed on National TV." So I ask again: What the hell are they smoking over at Breitbart.com?

Earth to Breitbart.com: "342 jokes" made at Obama's expense in 2011 - on national television!  Jimmy Kimmel, Bill Maher and Jay Leno - among others - have made plenty of jokes at Obama's expense on national television over the past four years.

I don't think that any of them felt "schooled" by Eastwood's RNC performance last night.

Seriously, I'm losing patience with - and faith in - Breitbart.com and their weird exaggerations of late.