It's like Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck looking like fools when they announced, without the slightest idea of the facts at hand, that an ACORN worker in California had killed her husband. (The ex-husband is alive and well, thank you very much.)

The Obama-hating GOP Noise Machine is never content with the facts as they exist, so they create the facts as they want them to be. (2 million at the D.C. protest!) And in the case of ACORN, partisans on the right are already busy stripping away any semblance of legitimacy the story may have had, at least in terms of how news consumers see it.

And for that we can thank folks like Taranto, who suggests a special prosecutor ought to be appointed to investigate ACORN... and Obama. No joke. A handful of community organizers with a private organization that receive so little in annual funding from the government that it couldn't even cover the Pentagon's costs for 15 minutes, were caught on tape doing and saying some dumb things, and so naturally Taranto thinks Obama ought to be at the center of a massive criminal investigation. Using beloved right-wing logic, Taranto claims that if ACORN isn't prosecuted, people will assume it's because of Obama and that's why we need a special prosecutor. (Anyone else feeling '90s nostalgia in the air?)

Not only is the call for a special prosecutor comical enough, but keep in mind that right-wingers like Taranto and the editorial page staffers at the WSJ opposed, and continue to oppose, pretty much every conceivable attempt to investigate the lawbreaking that occurred during the Bush administration. Conservative media members emphatically insist, for example, that nobody involved with okaying torture should ever--ever!--be criminally prosecuted, and certainly not anyone connected with the White House.

But all of a sudden, a special prosecutor is the only person who can uncover the truth about Obama, ACORN and...what exactly?

But I actually want to thank Taranto for so quickly overreaching and turning the ACORN story into just another partisan joke. Presented that way, I can't imagine news consumers will care.