One problem with living on the west coast is that an east coast wingnut nontroversy has time to start spreading on Twitter, get picked up by dozens of right wing blogs, and be exposed as a ridiculous fraudulent non-story before I even wake up.

The life cycles of these outrageous outrages are starting to be measured in minutes, but the Conveyor Belt of Bad Craziness just keeps on rollin’.

Today’s example: Jake Tapper of ABC News tweeted yesterday, at about 6:30pm (around sunset):

One minute to air and they decided to take the flag down from the live shot!

He included this photo of cranes taking down the large flag from one of the structures at Ground Zero in Manhattan:

Despite the fact that Tapper’s tweet happened several hours after President Obama’s appearance, when Tapper was setting up for one of his ABC News live shots, the wingnut echo chamber leaped to the conclusion that it was before — and that Obama had ordered the flag taken down because that’s just how much he hates America. So much, that he would remove the US flag from Ground Zero. The bastard.

Doug Ross hyperventilated: WTF at WTC? Obama Has American Flag Removed From Ground Zero Site Moments Before Photo Shoot!

Later, he added: “[Updated: or Perhaps Tapper Just Confused All of Us]”. Because that’s how tricksy the media are — they wait several hours to confuse right wing bloggers with innocuous tweets, knowing that those bloggers have no journalistic standards and won’t even look at timestamps if the story can be used to bash President Obama. Oh, wait.

Michelle Malkin put up a post titled, “Just wondering: Why was American flag removed from Ground Zero yesterday?” and then apologized, to her credit: No, Obama didn’t remove American flag from Ground Zero.

It also spread to Drudge Report, and to a host of C-list hacks like Weasel Zippers, who posted: Wow: Team Obama Removes American Flag From Ground Zero Moments Before Live Shoot….

That’s a Google cache link, because Mr. Zippers then deleted his embarrassing post with no word of explanation: Error 404 - Not Found.

And of course, there are many photos of Obama at the Ground Zero ceremony, with that flag prominently featured right behind him.

Earlier today, Jake Tapper tweeted again:

Bloggers who created a lie about the flag based on my innocuous tweet: please feel free to unfollow. don’t want my facts to become your lies

The really unusual part of this idiotic fake outrage is that these bloggers bothered to correct and delete their posts. But this is definitely the wingnuts’ Fail of the Week, because none of these super-patriotic patriots apparently considered the fact that US flags are supposed to be taken down at sunset.