"It was on a blog, so I don't know if it's actually true..."

Said Rush Limbaugh, quoting something that some blogger said came from David Brooks of the New York Times. (Subscriber link to the radio show transcript.) This set up an interesting discussion, which I'll get to in a minute, but what's with "It was on a blog, so I don't know if it's actually true"?

Now, it's attributed to Brooks, but I don't know if it's true. Some blog post by a guy named Ezra Klein, who I don't know, and don't interpret this as a criticism of anybody.

I Googled some of the text and easily found Ezra's post, which contained a link to the NYT site to a piece written by David Brooks. Maybe Rush just wanted to take a gratuitous swipe at bloggers, but it doesn't say much about his level of fact checking, and since his point was to go after Brooks, why leave any question about the attribution to Brooks?

Anyway, here's what Brooks wrote:

[T]he Republican prospects in the fall just got even dimmer. I say this not only because a weak general election candidate won a primary, but because Mitt Romney’s win [in Michigan] pretty much guarantees a bitter fight for the nomination. If you doubt that, here is what Rush Limbaugh said about McCain and Huckabee on his program today: “I’m here to tell you, if either of these two guys get the nomination, it’s going to destroy the Republican Party, it’s going to change it forever, be the end of it.” This week, Rush and his radio mimics have been on the rampage on the party’s modernizers, from Newt Gingrich on over.

And here's Rush's response:

I am personally trying to destroy the party's modernizers?... It is literally fascinating to hear that people who are not conservatives, or who have abandoned a lot of their conservatism, are now the party modernizers?... I am happy to be labeled and targeted as the guy who's targeting the modernizers of the Republican Party.