That’s the real question here. And the sad answer is, because they’re mostly stupid and impatient and more like the base than we’d like to admit.

By now, you’ve seen reports about the botched sting operation that James O’Keefe’s “Project Veritas” attempted. The goal was ostensibly to make The Washington Post look bad by tricking them into reporting the story of a woman who was falsely claiming to have been impregnated by U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore. This would presumably also help Moore by creating the impression that the previous reporting might also be phony.

Give O’Keefe credit for accidentally demonstrating that the notion we should reflexively believe every woman is a bad idea. The Post comes out looking shrewd because, as Bari Weiss observed on Twitter, its reporters followed Ronald Reagan’s advice to “trust, but verify.”

O’Keefe suggests that the Post published this story as a sort of preemptive strike to undermine some bombshell story he is about to release. I’m skeptical, but who knows? Unless or until that happens, we are left with a situation where the Post comes out smelling like roses, and conservative journalism (at least the guerilla alternative kind that O’Keefe practices) looks sloppy and untrustworthy.