Birth of the "Shoe Truthers"

After a shoe was thrown at Hillary Clinton last week in Las Vegas, far right wing pundits have started pumping a theory - we'll call them "shoe truthers" - that the attacker was a fake and the entire episode was staged.

Gee, that didn't take too long.

From Talking Points Memo:

A blog post published Monday at the website of Fox News commentator Bernard Goldberg speculated that Clinton probably "calculated it beforehand," as is "almost always true" with things that happen to her.

"So it would not be stretching logic to suppose that Hillary arranged to have the shoe thrown at her," wrote Arthur Louis at Goldberg's site. "Remembering the Bush incident [when an Iraqi journalist threw two shoes at President George W. Bush], she may have calculated that this would make her seem presidential. This would explain why Ms. Ernst was not pounded to a pulp by Hillary's bodyguards, and why she seems on the verge of getting off scot free. Don’t be too surprised, the next time you visit Phoenix, if you see her sitting at a table in a downtown Hillary for President store front, stuffing and sealing envelopes."

On Monday, Rush Limbaugh entertained the same idea, telling radio listeners he "can totally relate" to those who believe that "everything the Clintons do is staged or choreographed." Asked about it by a listener, he emphasized that he hadn't studied the incident and isn't too concerned about it, but said people have told him Clinton's reaction "wasn't natural."

"I'm sorry, I'm ill-equipped to comment," Limbaugh said, adding: "Maybe it's because, in my subconscious, I think it was staged, or set up, or whatever. ... I don't know why anybody would be throwing a shoe at Hillary unless -- maybe it's an attempt to make the Benghazi people look like nuts and lunatics and wackos."