The right wing blogosphere had to post retraction’s yesterday to the Matt Drudge claim that Michael Ware heckled during the McCain press conference on Sunday. Well all except one. That would be Malkin’s Hot Air blog, which is of course no shock. They started to set the record straight with this:

Update: Raw Story’s got two videos of the presser, one of the introductory remarks and another of the Q&A. Ware is visible in the right foreground, in the white shirt, in the second video when the camera cuts to a shot of the full room. Assuming RS hasn’t played games with the clip, I don’t see anything that looks like heckling or laughing. McCain and Graham are unperturbed and there are no interruptions. The second clip does cut out immediately after the press conference ends, with Ware still sitting in his seat and trying to ask a question, so it’s possible he did something then. But in that case, Drudge’s report is still wrong — he said the heckling happened “during” the presser, while McCain and Graham were speaking.

And then this update:

Update: As of 1:50 p.m., the McCain/Ware items have disappeared entirely from Drudge’s front page. Let’s see if Raw Story forces them back on.

Sounds like they are on the right track, until you read this update:

Update: A reader e-mails with a point worth noting: the Raw Story article credits a Michael Ware fan site with providing the video

Ahh so here we go. The wingnuts got their conspiracy hats on again. If you read through the comments people are conspiring that the video may have been edited. There is a problem with that though. This is the exact video that came from CNN’s own pipeline pay service. In that video there is no heckling going on.

Something else is worth noting here. All other news outlets were in on this press conference and had the cameras running non-stop. That includes FOX news. Now if Ware was doing this, then wouldn’t FOX be plastering the video all over to show what “liberal loons” CNN is? Hell yeah they would. O’Reilly and Hannity would have dedicated their entire shows to it. Hell Scarborough would have devoted a big part of his show to it last night.

The fact is that Drudge either lied or got wrong information. Now if he received the wrong information, who was his source? I doubt anyone in the media would have made this bogus claim to him. I also doubt anyone in the military would have. I got a strong feeling someone from the McCain campaign decided to make an anonymous tip in order to discredit the reporter who made their boss look like an idiot last week.

Again – why do people hold Drudge as a reliable source? You keep doing that and you end up looking like a fool at the end. Drudge also has this habit of having his stories debunked and then the story just vanishes into the infinite black-hole of the internet. That appears to have happened with this story also. Of course I did save a screen capture of his post so it is preserved forever.