A political pratfall isn’t complete until it gets the Stephen Colbert treatment. And so on Tuesday, after Breitbart got a story about as wrong as you can get, the conservative news site had its turn.
Colbert was unsparing in his ridicule of the article by Warner Todd Huston, the mustachioed writer of a Breitbart story that claimed Loretta Lynch, President Obama’s nominee for attorney general, had defended former President Bill Clinton during the Whitewater investigation.
“This bombshell destroys Loretta Lynch’s credibility to be attorney general if it were true,” Colbert said. “But it turns out Teddy Roosevelt here had the wrong Loretta Lynch.”
After the entire premise for Huston’s article had unraveled, Breitbart ran a correction for the ages. Allow Colbert to explain.
“But as soon as walrus man noticed the mistake, Breitbart issued a correction by leaving up the same headline and adding the word ‘corrected,'” Colbert said. “From there, it’s the exact same article about how Obama’s Loretta Lynch defended the Clintons until you get to the very bottom of the article where it reads, ‘Correction: The Loretta Lynch identified earlier as the Whitewater attorney was, in fact, a different attorney.”
Breitbart ultimately pulled the story off its site, but Colbert still offered mock praise for the initial response to the error.
“So I’m giving a tip of the hat to Breitbart for breaking this news, finding out it’s broken, but sticking with the story anyway,” Colbert said.
