Bob Geiger Wrong About AP Story - Will He Apologize?

Say what you will about the liberals, but when they blow it, they blow it big.

On Tuesday, Bob Geiger at the Huffington Post demanded to know if rightwing bloggers (including The Jawa Report) would be apologizing to the Associated Press for doubting their now-discredited story about the six burning Sunnis:

"It's Official: Media Body Burning Story is Bogus," crowed Newsbusters -- the wingnut National Enquirer -- who just went mad with glee proclaiming that "The news that six Sunnis were captured by Shiites, doused with kerosine [sic] and burned alive, was too sensational to not be picked up by the mainstream media. But it turns out that the event never happened. Furthermore, the Iraqi 'spokesman' relied on to give all information regarding this event is as fictional as the story itself."

Newsbusters took it a step further by also concluding that NBC's decision to begin calling what's going on in Iraq a "civil war" was based in part on the "bogus" nature of that story.

Flopping Aces, which seems to have started this embarrassing affair, has been running a lengthy series ominously called "Getting The News From The Enemy" while The Jawa Report really stands proud and proclaims that "It's unlikely that the Associated Press and other news agencies will issue corrections approaching the sensationalism with which they originally pushed the false stories."

And today, the Iraqi government has announced that the AP's source, the supposed "police captain Jamil Hussein" doesn't work for any department of the Iraqi government. Wow, Bob, your face must be pretty crimson about now, eh?

I'd also like to commend Bob Geiger for emphasizing his status as a clueless tool by quoting the same person (that would be moi) twice
(from NewsBusters and The Jawa Report) without even realizing it.

Update: Baghdad Bob starts to suspect that he may have made a hideous mistake:

The facts are what they are, and I'm patient enough to wait for the full story to come out -- but the spin and public-relations flackery being cited by the right-wing mouthpieces are not facts. If I need to do a retraction, I will. But pardon me if I wait for evidence above and beyond some screeching wingnut scrambling to paint the news as they wish it would be, instead of looking at the mess that Iraq truly is and contemplating the meaning of accountability.

Evidently, the fact that the AP's source doesn't exist isn't enough evidence for Bobby. Nor does AP's curious downgrading of the five-mosques-burned-to-the-ground story to one mosque slightly damaged.