Reps. Burton, Gohmert Bring Beck Blackboard Bungle To The House Floor (VIDEO)

Jason Linkins
HuffPost

As anyone who's watched the Glenn Beck Hour of What Richard Hofstadter Said Back In 1964 knows, the eponymous host enjoys a good scribble on the ol' blackboard. There, he truly indulges his art, looping together ornate conspiracies with his idiosyncratic beefs in the purest display of Bretonian automatic writing you are likely to see these days. It's good for a lark, but you sort of hope that it's not stuff that reruns itself on, say, the floor of the House of Representatives.

But that's apparently what's happened, courtesy of Reps. Dan Burton (R-IN) and Louie Gohmert (R-TX)!

WATCH:

Monday on Fox News, Beck claimed that President Obama gave $2 billion to the Brazilian state-run oil company PetroBras "just days" after conservative boogeyman George Soros strengthened his investment in the company.

The very next evening, the two Republican congressmen repeated Beck's baseless charge on the House floor. While criticizing the moratorium on offshore drilling brought on by the Gulf oil spill, Rep. Burton said that "we just sent $2 billion to Brazil so they can do offshore drilling." Moments later, Burton parroted Beck's fantasy version of events: "We don't need to be sending Mr. Soros money in Brazil so he can make more money by doing offshore drilling with our taxpayers' money."

That's per Media Matters' Political Correction, which goes on to point out the big "Duh" here: "The problem -- for Beck and the GOP -- is that none of this is true. Bush appointees at the independent Export-Import Bank approved the loan, not President Obama; and George Soros upped his investment in PetroBras in late 2008, some months before the bank made its preliminary commitment to the company."

Happily, Burton and Gohmert aren't really members of the House Grown-up Caucus -- but still.

(Video here.)