Look at it this way: If you’re going to smear conservatives in order to turn out a few extra liberals at the polls next month, this is a heck of a lot more effective than the White House’s dopey demagoguery of the Chamber of Commerce.

Newsbusters did all the work in debunking this so I’m going to make you click here to read their post in full. Suffice it to say, no, Rep. Steve Stockman didn’t receive “advance notice” of anything. But rest assured that if he had gotten a fax about the bombing in advance, he’d still be getting smeared in precisely these same terms even had he turned the fax over to police right away (which he did on the day of the bombing). It reminds me, in fact, of lefty hero Alan Grayson accusing Bush a few months ago of having let 9/11 happen. Technically he was accusing Bush of not having taken the warnings about a hijacking plot seriously enough, but the “let it happen” rhetoric was his sly way of suggesting that Bush knew what was coming and happily allowed it to occur to further his policy agenda. The left likes to call that sort of loaded language a “dog whistle” insofar as certain listeners will hear extra meaning in it, and that’s certainly true in the Grayson example: He’s winking at Truthers and hardcore Bush-hating lefties by hinting that Bush was in cahoots with Al Qaeda while being careful not to explicitly accuse him of anything. Maddow is doing something similar here, presenting the point about the fax ostensibly to show only that Stockman was “close” to militias, but of course the (incorrect) rhetoric about “advance notice” implies something similar to Grayson’s point — that Stockman knew what was going down and cheerily kept it to himself to help his terrorist buddies out. And lest you doubt that this sort of scaremongering is geared at helping Democratic turnout, here are the very next words she uttered after the bit about Stockman:

There are extremist candidates who from time to time survive the churn of electoral politics and actually make it into the mainstream. There‘s always a few. But there has never been this many.

None of this makes any sense. We‘re just about to elect a whole bunch of extremists—unless thing change in the next two week.

Two weeks out. How do Democrats run against this? That‘s next.

So there you go. Oh, one more point: Outside the Beltway dug around a bit and found that this isn’t the first time she’s referred to Stockman and Oklahoma City on air. Back in March, she also mentioned the fax incident — except that, on that occasion, she noted that the fax was received after the bombing, not before. How that turned into “advance notice” this time, I don’t know. Check the calendar, I guess.