I guess you can go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao

So, you've probably heard by now that the story about Homeland Security officers paying a visit to a student who had checked out a copy of Mao's Little Red Book was a hoax; the student just pulled the story out of his ass for some reason. I have to agree with Battlepanda, who calls the student a bastard on the grounds that "we have too much shit going on in this country right now for dumbass college students to be damaging the credibility of civil liberty violation stories with larks like this."

Of course, the story is being used by those on the right as proof of ... well, something or other. Here's Instapundit:

I'm disturbed tremendously that such a suspicious story was accepted so uncritically by alleged critical thinkers

Hey, Instafuckface, I can think of a few other suspicious stories that were accepted uncritically by alleged critical thinkers...

...something about the smoking gun coming in the form of a mushroom cloud ... something else about Iraqis welcoming soldiers with flowers and erecting statues of President Bush...