DERPAs we documented last Saturday, Jim Hoft (the “Gateway Pundit”) may be the single dumbest and least scrupulous blogger on the right (and that’s saying something).

He was the first to float the amazingly stupid “Applause-Gate” story — mistaking the Tucson memorial’s closed captioning system for an applause prompt, and claiming that the White House engineered a nefarious scheme to make the crowd cheer.

From Hoft, the fail spread rapidly, finding willing parrots in Michelle Malkin, Hot Air, Doug Ross, Pamela Geller, and many other corners of the right wing echo chamber.

But yesterday the right’s true leader, Rush Limbaugh, killed the story before it could get to Fox News.

RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t know if you have seen this. There’s a couple blogs out there saying that there were applause signs on the JumboTron at Obama’s speech. Now, I’ve looked at screen shots of this and I don’t think those were applause signs. As an expert in closed-captioning, I think they were closed-captioning Obama’s speech. I know they were, or it was a big teleprompter, one of the two, but the text of the speech was on the JumboTron, and if you’re watching a closed-caption movie, TV show, they’ll put in parentheses a song that’s played. And they might identify the song or the type of music it is. If you’re watching a program where there is applause, there will be parentheses, “applause” in the closed-captioning.

After that, the wingnut feeding frenzy subsided remarkably quickly.

But the originator of this monumentally numbskulled bogus outrage, Jim Hoft, has yet to retract or even acknowledge his mistake. Will Hoft ever take responsibility for his ridiculous false claims?