HOW BULLSHIT WORKS, PART 673,099.

Along with the general absurd claim that Democrats are trying to kill Republicans, I've been noticing this story going around that Stephanie Wilkinson, the owner of the Red Hen who famously asked Sarah Huckabee Sanders to leave her premises last week, and who described her approach as "polite," actually followed and harassed the Press Secretary's family to their next destination. Washington Examiner:

"Once Sarah and her family left -- and of course Sarah was asked to please vacate, Sarah and her husband just went home. They had sort of had enough. But the rest of her family went across the street to a different restaurant," Huckabee said on "The Laura Ingraham Show." "The owner of the Red Hen -- nobody's told this -- then followed them across the street, called people and organized a protest yelling and screaming at them from outside the other restaurant and creating this scene."

No corroboration on that, and you'd have to be nose-blind to the smell of bullshit to take Mike Huckabee's word on anything. This of course lets out Fox News, which eats the story up, not to mention lowbrow wingnut sites like Twitchy, which confusedly hollers an alternate version ("It gets WORSE: Red Hen owner reportedly kicked Sarah Sanders out then FOLLOWED her to new restaurant to protest") and further purports, "So this could be wrong but at the same time, it could be right. And honestly we hate to say it but it sure sounds like something that the owner of the restaurant would do," because they've been close followers of Stephanie Wilkinson's career for a long time and know how she would behave in such a situation. Plus CNS News' Craig Bannister claiming, also on Mike Huckabee's say-so, Wilkinson "organized a mob" to hector the Sanderses, etc.

My favorite citation, however, is from an allegedly classier source:

They're all full of shit from the bottom and definitely not excluding the top.

UPDATE. In comments, Ellis Weiner:

Her "Why I said 'if''" is a) an internet classic waiting to be born ("If Megan McArdle is a strangler of babies, she shouldn't be given a prestigious commentary gig." "But she's not! You made that up!" "Why I said 'if.'" and 

b) is every bit as intellectually respectable as Jim Carrey's "So you're saying there's a chance" in--fittingly--Dumb and Dumber.

Great idea and a nice companion meme to the one given us by McArdle's obvious model, Peggy Noonan: "Is it irresponsible to speculate? It would be irresponsible not to." But, like socialism, it is something the American people will never accept.