Liberal accuses Paul Ryan of drinking expensive wine or something

I saw this story in passing over the weekend, but frankly, between the source and the topic I considered it too dumb to check. Essentially, the liberal Talking Points Memo ran an overheated story about how some woman confronted Rep. Paul Ryan in a DC restaurant for drinking a glass of expensive wine. If you’re not familiar with TPM, you’ve led a good life: It’s run by Josh Marshall, who was once a somewhat reasonable liberal but let dreams of Kos-like fame and fortune go to his head and sold out to the hard left. He was big on whispery posts about the Valerie Plame nonsense back in the day. Now he’s apparently running lame stuff about Congressmen and wine. Congressmen not named “Kennedy,” and wine. And the leftwing blog hivemind dutifully ran with the story as if it was a big deal, when it was a whole lotta nothin’.

Anyway, the woman’s story has fallen apart and she has decided to clam up. It turns out that pretty much none of her story was correct, except the price of the wine, which Ryan paid for out of his own pocket. There were no ethics implications whatsoever. The fact that she and her husband were in the same restaurant, enjoying the expensive fare there that most Americans of whatever political leanings can’t afford, never dawned on her as hypocritical if she decided to attack Ryan. But such is the liberal mind these days. It’s like Obama, who gets to jet around to dates with his wife in Air Force One, lecturing people who have been successful enough to be able to buy their own jets. It ought to be enough of a joke to get him laughed out of the room.

The whole story is one of the sillier ones in all of our silly politics. We have wars on and the nation is hurtling toward bankruptcy, but TPM and some woman who once apparently worked on one of John Kerry’s campaigns tries becoming a kind of informant on perfectly innocent and unremarkable behavior for the sake of partisanship.