When you find yourself in a hole, it’s usually a good idea to stop digging. Apparently, though, that age-old wisdom never made its way to Democrat Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib.

At a pro-Hamas rally outside the Capitol yesterday, Tlaib doubled down with a disjointed ramble: “That’s what’s been really painful. It’s, it’s just — continue to watch people think it’s okay to bomb a hospital where children. … You know what’s so hard sometimes is watching those videos and, and, the people telling the kids, ‘Don’t cry,’ and, like, let them cry. … They can cry, I can cry, we all can cry. If we’re not crying, something is wrong.”

Something is wrong, all right, but it’s not what Tlaib thinks. What’s wrong is her refusal to walk back the vile smear she threw out Tuesday afternoon: “Israel just bombed the Baptist Hospital killing 500 Palestinians (doctors, children, patients) just like that.”

As of this hour, her X post hasn’t been taken down, although it’s been helpfully appended with “Readers added context,” one bit coming from a Wall Street Journal report: “The U.S. has collected ‘high confidence’ intelligence showing that the explosion at a hospital compound in Gaza was caused by the militant group Palestinian Islamic Jihad, not an Israeli strike.”

Perhaps Tlaib doesn’t want to take the Journal’s word for it. But what about the word of Joe Biden’s National Security Council?

“While we continue to collect information,” posted NSC spokeswoman Adrienne Watson, “our current assessment, based on analysis of overhead imagery, intercepts and open source information, is that Israel is not responsible for the explosion at the hospital in Gaza yesterday.”

To be fair, though, most Democrats aren’t aligned with the Hamas Wing of their party. Not even John Fetterman, who last week lamented to Stephen Colbert that America “is not sending their best and brightest” to Congress, could support his Jew-hating colleagues’ increasingly untenable position.

“It’s truly disturbing” posted Fetterman’s handlers, “that Members of Congress rushed to blame Israel for the hospital tragedy in Gaza. Who would take the word of a group that just massacred innocent Israeli civilians over our key ally?”

When you’ve lost Senator Hoodie…

But it wasn’t just Fetterman. This X post from Tlaib’s Democrat colleague, Jared Moskowitz, has been gathering dust for nearly two days now: “My democratic colleagues who blamed Israel should take down their posts.”

Minutes later, Moskowitz followed up: “PSA to my Democratic Colleagues: Believe Nothing Hamas says ever! ever! ever!”

National Review’s John McCormack put it to Tlaib directly: “Have you seen the evidence that Israel was not behind this bombing? Have you heard the White House and National Security Council said Israel was not behind the bombing? What evidence was the basis for the original tweet, congresswoman? Do you have any evidence for that claim that Israel killed 500 innocent civilians? If you don’t have any evidence, why keep it up?”

The truth is out there for every fair-minded person to see, which indicates that Tlaib, who has a national security clearance but doesn’t seem inclined to use it, is being willfully blind.

Typical of the sloppy reporting, even after it became clear that Israel wasn’t responsible for the explosion, was this headline from ABC News: “Hundreds killed in explosion at Gaza hospital: Gaza Health Ministry,” which was followed by a more specific claim within the article itself: “At least 500 people have been killed in an explosion at Al Ahli Arab Hospital in the middle of Gaza City, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.”

The Hamas propaganda wasn’t just the blaming of Israel though; it was also the making up of a location and a casualty count. As we noted yesterday, it wasn’t an airstrike, it didn’t hit a hospital, it didn’t kill hundreds, and Israel didn’t do it. But other than that, the reporting was accurate.

But what are we to expect when our mainstream media trusts its reporting to the Gaza Ministry of Health, which is nothing more than a propaganda organ for Hamas?

Asked this morning on Fox News about whether Tlaib might have evidence to back up her claims, Republican Senator Marco Rubio pulled no punches: “Well, we’ve seen evidence that she’s lying, and that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about, and that she’s just parroting the Hamas line. … We need to stop referring to the Gaza Ministry of Health. It is the Hamas Ministry of Health. … Both Senator [Mark] Warner, a Democrat, and I — he’s the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and I’m the vice chairman — we’ve put out a statement together, we’ve both reviewed the intelligence available … and we are convinced that this was not an Israeli strike. … I think the danger here is that [Tlaib’s words] aren’t just annoying words. They are leading to action. We see unrest in Amman. We see unrest in Lebanon. We see growing unrest in the West Bank. We see it developing all over the world, [and it could] threaten the governments of countries that are critical to stability in the Middle East, like Jordan, like Lebanon, like Egypt.”

Perhaps we shouldn’t expect more from a congresswoman who flies a “Palestinian” flag outside the door of her DC office, but what about the professionals? Shouldn’t we demand more from those to whom we entrust “the first draft of history”?

Perhaps not — at least not when it comes to the Jewish state. “The media holding Israel to a different standard, in this context, than it would any other country is a form of discrimination,” said former George W. Bush foreign policy adviser Dan Senor, who added, “I would say there’s some underlying anti-Semitism in the way some parts of the media covers any conflict Israel is in.”

This seems right to us. It’ll be interesting to see whether Tlaib rescinds and apologizes or simply lays low and lets the storm blow over. From what we know of Tlaib, we’d bet big on the latter.