Amazing, how over the span of eight-plus years, high-powered conservatives with a national reach are touting themselves as such helpless little infants, so untutored in the ways of society, that they can claim they’re unfamiliar with something that’s present in every sports bar and many fast-food places, and has been for over two freaking decades: “closed” captioning on TVs.

I am not kidding. Sarah Janacek and Kellyanne Fitzpatrick did it in late 2002, and Jim Hoft’s doing in early 2011:

It appears that Gateway Pundit saw a picture of the Tucson rally, in which the Jumbotron was featured. He then mistook the closed captioning as “instructions” for the audience to applaud.

That’s right, folks: A bit of technology that every sports bar, many regular bars, and many casual-dining restaurants have possessed for nearly three decades is somehow so unfamiliar to these self-styled wise ones that they can allegedly mistake it for “applause signs”.

If this sounds awfully familiar to some of you, it should: It’s the same bogus story that was bruited about after the Wellstone memorial:

Kellyanne (Fitzpatrick) Conway went on TV the day after the memorial and told a nationwide audience that the Jumbotron instructed the crowd “when to cheer and when to jeer.” (The speeches were close-captioned and would indicate when there was LAUGHTER and APPLAUSE.)

Even though the words on the closed captioning followed the speaker’s words by five or so seconds and were often misspelled, Sarah Janecek, a Minnesota Republican lobbyist, said the speeches on the Jumbotron were proof that the speeches had been written and vetted by the cynically politically motivated Democrat who ran the event. Actually, the people who spoke at the Wellstone memorial were all chosen by the families of those who died. No one’s speech was vetted. The Wellstone people had all spent the previous five days going to funerals. It never occurred to them to vet the speeches. The irony is that because they weren’t thinking politically, they opened themselves to being accused of staging a political event.

Janacek’s tried to deny all of this, but I — and several other persons who were at the event and/or heard Janacek’s dishonest commentary on it on Minnesota Public Radio the morning afterwards — know better. Here’s Techno, a regular Balloon Juice commenter and personal friend of Paul Wellstone:

@Doctor Gonzo:
It is true what you say about this stupid slander about closed captioning being used after the Wellstone funeral. In fact, it was first said by that execrable Republican hack Sarah Janecek on MPR the day after the funeral.

The reason I remember this so clearly is that I was driving my car and got so upset at this lie that I had a heart attack and wound up in the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. I have not knowingly conversed with a Republican since that day except to insult them. I am STILL angry about that cynical lie.

And here’s Velveteen Ocelot commenting at Democratic Underground:

She was all frothing at the mouth about the memorial right afterwards, lying out her ass on local Hate Radio about how the organizers were using closed captioning to prompt the crowd, and going on about how horrible and partisan and scripted it was. Maybe she realizes how full of crap she was and feels bad about it now; or maybe — more likely, I think — she just wants to distance herself from the truly repellent Katherine Kersten, who really went off the deep end in that obnoxious column. I was doing some volunteer work at one of the DFL offices just before that election, trying to get out the vote for Mondale, and Al Franken showed up and got after Janacek on the phone to call her on her bullshit. I know what she said then, and it was 180 degrees from what she’s saying now.

A caution to those conservatives who, like Jim Hoft, are tempted to revive and repurpose the Wellstone event “applause signs” smear, or any other of the smears originated and disseminated by Republicans about that event: The lying by Republicans about the Wellstone event in Williams Arena was so egregious and so infuriating that it did two (2) things: it led to the rise of the reality-based, progressive side of the blogosphere, and it caused Al Franken to decide on a career in electoral politics. Do you all really want to risk anything like that happening again?

UPDATE: TBogg notes that at least one other right-wing blogger is jumping into the fray on Hoft’s side — even as his own commenters try vainly to correct him. And when a person who actually works as a closed-captioner tried to explain to Hoft and his fan base how closed-captioning works, one of them looked him up online, found out he was gay, and decided that meant his word couldn’t be trusted. Oy gewalt.

People are discussing how to best honor the late great Teddy Kennedy, and the first thought that comes to mind is to do what he would have wanted us to do — which is to memorialize him by getting meaningful health care reform passed and made into law. Ah, but while that is the decent thing to do, it’s not allowed for Democrats.

Remember the ginned-up real-time media outrage over five minutes of remarks during Paul Wellstone’s Williams Arena memorial event in 2002? Remember how that fake outrage over the "partisan" nature of Rick Kahn’s remarks was used to elect Norm Coleman to Wellstone’s seat?

Remember also when, a few short weeks later when Strom Thurmond had his 100th birthday party, the media did NOT stage a real-time freakout over partisanship when Thurmond’s birthday party (and looming resignation from the Senate) was not only turned into a GOP campaign ad, but into praise for Thurmond’s deeply racist career?It was only dirty nasty bloggers like Atrios who spoke out at first about Trent Lott’s lavish praise of Thurmond’s 1948 racist Dixiecrat challenge to Harry Truman — and it took several days of shouting on their parts to get the GOP/Media Complex interested.

Finally, the same Villagers who were so heatedly critical of the (non-racist) Wellstone service deigned to notice what Lott had said and done concerning Thurmond — and then only because Karl Rove had decided to use the opportunity to punish Lott, not for being a racist, but for acting as if the Senate GOP Caucus was allowed to act independently of the Rove/Cheney/Bush White House. Hell, Lott’s ‘punishment’ didn’t even last that long. By 2006, he’d got the minority whip position and his little moment of disgrace had been all but excised from the mainstream media accounts of the time. Meanwhile, the same "Eeeek! How partisan!" screechings made against the Wellstone memorial were being made yet again by the media goons in the wake of Coretta Scott King’s funeral.

Always remember, folks, whatever you’re planning on doing: It’s OK — but only if you’re Republican.

UPDATE: Sure enough, the Cons are already partisanly warming up their "Eeeeek Democrats are so PARTISAN" engines. Told ya.