This post from Popehat is freaking priceless.

Do you contribute something worthwhile to the marketplace of ideas, or are you just a noisy asshat? Here’s one way to tell: how do you act when you are proven wrong about something? Do you learn from the experience and admit you were wrong — or do you double down?

These days there’s an extremely irritating trend towards doubling down. Faced with the fact that they rushed to judgment, or were hoaxed, noisy asshats increasingly respond a jaw-dropping premise: “the fact that I was taken in just shows you that my point was premised on truth.”

Case in point: Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh was hoaxed — or at least pretended to be hoaxed — by a satirical report about the contents of Obama’s college thesis, which purportedly called for redistribution of wealth. When the hoax was revealed, did Limbaugh own his mistake? He did not. He doubled down:

“So I shout from the mountaintops: ‘It was satire!’” Limbaugh said on the program. “But we know he (Obama) thinks it. Good comedy, to be comedy, must contain an element of truth, and we know how he feels about distribution of wealth.

Noisy asshat indeed! I LOL’ed!

Another example I’ll point out is Rathergate — a.k.a. the Killian documents controversy. Remember that? I posted about it here:

In September 2004, less than two months before a presidential election, Dan Rather ran a news story on 60 Minutes about the Killian documents — six documents critical of President George W. Bush’s service in the National Guard, alleged to have been written in the early 1970’s — even though the documents had not been authenticated by CBS. The documents have since been shown to be forgeries created on a modern-day computer. Dan Rather has continued to stand by his story, and in subsequent interviews has stated that even if the documents are false, the underlying story is still true. Hence, not only does Rather believe in something in spite of a lack of evidence, but he also considers it acceptable to use false evidence to convince others.

Yep, another noisy asshat.

Can you think of any other examples?