TEA PARTY CONSPIRACY THEORY: EPIC FAIL. The Playboy blog item that I debunked earlier has been taken down. So has a TPM Muckraker piece making similar claims. And it turns out that the story wasn’t true. This is no surprise to me, but it’s something of an embarrassment for those who fell for it. It also seems as if they should have apologized for the error, not just taken down the posts. Yet as far as I can tell, neither site has acknowledged the error; they’ve just sent the offending matter down the memory hole.

Of course, maybe they were just embarrassed by Andrew Sullivan’s “Koch-tease” joke.

UPDATE: Some background on the viral campaign, here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: They fell for it over at DailyKos. No surprise there . . . .