The New Republic praises Andrew Breitbart for avoiding the extreme elements of the “Tea Party” movement:

While bashing the media, Breitbart is a firewall against some of the tea party movement's more extreme, insular elements. His sites have never veered into birtherism, and he defended Generation Zero director Steve Bannon when the crowd instinctively booed the filmmaker's Harvard-to-Goldman Sachs career track.

Boy, “never” just isn't what it used to be.

See, (as Eric noted earlier) Breitbart's “Big Hollywood” site peddled Birtherism last fall.

If you go to Big Hollywood's home page and type in the words “Obama birth certificate,” the fourth hit is a piece titled "In Defense of the Birthers." The author of that piece says he isn't a birther, but they make some good points, and argues “For all of these reasons and many, many more, Barack Obama seems to be, if not un-American, then at least not-American. Which brings us back to citizenship. The question the Birthers are really trying to ask isn't 'is Barack Obama one of us.' He plainly is not one of us.”

The second hit is a column arguing “For my part, I hope Obama is an American citizen. ... The hypocrisy of liberals is apparent in the fact that not a single one has expressed any concern over Obama's refusal to offer up any of those documents or expressed the slightest alarm over the Constitution's being treated like so much toilet paper.”

And there's more.

So, we know The New Republic didn't bother to do a quick search on MediaMatters.org for “Breitbart birther,” and they didn't bother to search Breitbart's web sites, either. The question, then, is what TNR based its claim that Breitbart's “sites have never veered into birtherism” upon? Did they just take Breitbart's word for it?

Breitbart, by the way, calls the TNR article a “must read”:

Gee, I wonder why.

UPDATE: TNR has now changed its article to read “Breitbart is a firewall against some of the tea party movement's more extreme, insular elements. His sites have only occasionally* veered into birtherism...” That's what qualifies you as a “firewall” against the “extreme” these days? “Only occasionally” veering into birtherism? Wow. And I'd still love to hear an explanation for how TNR got that wrong in the first place, given that the most cursory check possible would have shown that it isn't true that Bretbart's sites “never” veer into birtherism.