"Pajamas Media" is the $3.5 million right-wing flop founded in 2005 by "CEO" Roger Simon and LGF's Charles Johnson. Launched with great fanfare, it has thus far been almost entirely inconsequential except as an abundant source of derision. Until I just mentioned it, did you even know that it still existed? Its mission, according to CEO Simon, is to "raise [blogs'] credibility higher than they are now" and to create "a new method of fact-checking."

Pajamas Media boasts some of the most discredited and dishonest commentators around, including Glenn Reynolds as the "Knoxville Editor," warmonger Victor Davis Hanson, and Michael Ledeen, who has devoted his life to advocating an attack on Iran. Before the entire project even began, Roger Ailes presciently predicted its demise, expressing doubts (to put it politely) that "a neocon Memeorandum which relies upon the accuracy and integrity of Charles Johnson and Michael Leeden [could] be successful."

But last Thursday, Pajamas Media thought that it was finally about to make it big with its worldwide exclusive "scoop" -- "reported" by Ledeen -- that "Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, is dead." Nobody else had reported this bombshell. Only Pajamas! And, Drudge-like, they excitedly promoted it with bold red letters on their front page. As Michelle Malkin's Hot Air site put it when touting the Pajamas "exclusive":

This is either going to be a two-ton feather in Pajamas’s cap or a major embarrassment.

And 48 hours later, still nobody has reported this except for the increasingly lonely Pajamas. James Wolcott, doing his best to write through the scornful laughter, provides all of the ugly details here, concluding: "Pajamas Media may have just fathered its own self-inflicted Rathergate."

As I document in an article in the current issue of American Conservative Magazine, this is standard operating procedure for how pro-war, pro-Bush pundits like Ledeen (along with people like Charles Krauthammer and Peggy Noonan) function. They are completely unbound by facts and will recklessly spew the cheapest and most irresponsible innuendo as long as it bolsters their political goals. And when they are proven wrong -- as they are with painful regularity -- they simply move on, pretending it never happened. That, of course, is how the Iraq War was sold to Americans and how those responsible continue to parade around as wise and noble experts. But slowly (though decisively), they are all becoming exposed for what they are. There is no higher priority than doing what one can to facilitate that process.

ALSO: Both Digby and Jonathan Schwarz have superb posts highly worth reading on the complete hostility to facts and reality which drives right-wing punditry.