Yesterday, NewsBusters' Tim Graham reported that on Election Night Arianna Huffington tweeted that Marco Rubio was “Looking Like a Central American Dictator.” Hours later, professional smear merchant and race-baiter Andrew Breitbart slapped the headline “Why Arianna Huffington Played The Race Card” across three of his Big sites, accusing her of making a “racist comment” in order to “inject race” and “play off racial fears and ignorance,” and thus prevent Rubio from becoming president at some future date.

Aside from being based on a wholly inflated view of the power of Huffington's Twitter feed, the claims by Graham and Breitbart were completely incoherent. In her tweet -- which both conservatives posted -- Huffington wrote:

This is not the clearest statement in the world (probably because it's a tweet), but do you see the three words that you need to completely ignore in order for Breitbart and Graham's reading of the tweet to make sense?

Doesn't it look like Huffington is quoting something Bush-Cheney '04 chief strategist Matthew Dowd said to her while they were on the set of ABC's Nightline, and not stating her own opinion?

Sure enough, a few hours later, Huffington tweeted:

Given that Breitbart helped Huffington launch Huffington Post, I'm willing to bet that he actually has her contact information and could have, if he actually cared about the truth, cleared this up with a phone call.

And so we learn again two very important lessons about Andrew Breitbart: He really needs to stop accusing other people of being racist, and he will always smear first and ask for comment after, if ever. He's clearly learned absolutely nothing from the Shirley Sherrod fiasco that annihilated what reputation he had.

Incidentally, I can't seem to find Breitbart's statement calling out Rush Limbaugh for “playing off racial fears” after Limbaugh said President Obama “is behaving like an African colonial despot.” Go figure.