Matt Drudge has now picked up the Right Wing Watch story about Rick Santorum’s speech at Ave Maria University. That has brought the speech to the intention of Red bloggers who didn’t bother to notice the original story because they are so deeply cocooned that it takes an accredited Red source to drive a fact through their thick skulls. (Rush Limbaugh is only the fattest example.)

But Drudge – who of course doesn’t bother to credit the actual reporters who did the actual work of finding the actual news, as he rips them off, also gets the story importantly wrong. So the wingnutosphere is debating Santorum’s claim that Satan is attacking American institutions, rather than his much more damaging claim that mainline Protestantism is currently under Satan’s influence and is no longer part of “the world of Christianity.”

[Cross-posted at The Reality-Based Community]

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Mark Kleiman is a professor of public policy at the New York University Marron Institute.