Conservative blogger JammieWearingFool, 2008 Weblog Award Winner for “Best Big Blog,” today confirms that at least one-third of his name is accurate.

In a post titled “Was Alan Grayson Really a Mental Patient?” he excerpts at length and links to a post titled “Congressman Grayson Briefly Spent Time in Mental Hospital in 1980s” at the blog Right Handed Pitcher. The post alleges that Grayson “spent four days in the Psychiatric Institute of Washington,” and that he “was extremely combative with fellow employees, including slapping a female intern in the face.”

While JammieWearingFool is careful to add a question mark to his headline and couch his post in wishy-washy language like “take it for what it's worth,” this is yet another case of conservative bloggers proving they lack even basic fact-checking skills.

While there are several things that probably should have given JammieWearingFool pause before he forwarded this story, one stands out above the others. The byline on The Right Handed Pitcher post is Matthew Avitabile. You may remember Matthew Avitabile from last Friday, when a hoax post about Obama's thesis with Avitabile's byline was picked up by Michael Ledeen, then Limbaugh, Dobbs, et. al. Back in January, Avitabile also fooled gullible conservatives with a bogus story about an Obama military oath. While I suppose it is unreasonable to expect every conservative blogger to keep up with the embarrassing failures of their compatriots on the right -- it's a lot to keep track of -- perhaps the “Satire” tag at the bottom of the Right Handed Pitcher post might have been a good tipoff.

We can probably look forward to another game of conservative telephone, where everyone cites each other making outrageous claims without anyone doing basic fact-checking.

The conservative media: where no story is too flimsy to run with.