This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2017, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

Are you like me? Don't you think it's about time that we get to the bottom of the slaying of Sean Hannity?

I understand that some believe Mr. Hannity's death was accidental, the result of a kinky bondage sex party that went a little too far. But if that is the case, why was the Fox News host dressed as a Teletubby? And who is this Hannity-look-alike who replaced him and has been spouting the preposterous, unsubstantiated speculation about the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich?

We deserve answers, or at the very least more questions, and I'm confident state Sen. Todd Weiler will back me up on that point.

The Davis County Republican was in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday listening to Newt Gingrich, the former House Speaker/Presidential candidate/novelist discussing America's opioid epidemic when Weiler's got sucked into the latest Hannity-fueled nonsense about the Rich slaying.

In case you missed it, Rich was a 27-year-old staffer at the Democratic National Committee who was shot and killed on his way home last summer in what Washington police are calling a botched robbery.

Monday night, Weiler wondered aloud via Twitter about the Seth Rich conspiracy nonsense:

"I've never been much of a conspiracy theorist, but I'd be interested to find more about the death of Seth Rich."

Then it was during Gingrich's drug talk Tuesday morning — Gingrich was talking about drugs and not, we have to guess, on drugs when he was talking — that Weiler got called out for his Twitter speculation.

"If Seth Rich was murdered in a robbery gone wrong, why was his wallet, watch, and phone left behind?" Weiler said after being called out for feeding the conspiracy trolls.

Then followed it up with:

"??? Seth Rich:

1. If he was killed in a robbery, why wasn't he robbed?

2. If he was killed by a stray bullet, why was he shot twice?"

The insinuation, which has been fueled by right-wing media is that Rich was murdered by Democratic thugs for leaking DNC documents to Wikileaks. This was based on speculation from a third-rate private investigator who almost immediately recanted his story and said he was given the information by a Fox News reporter.

The retraction meant there was literally no evidence to support the story and Rich's family pleaded with the disgusting sex-freak Hannity, or his robot replacement, to drop the story, but Hannity kept going after it like he would Tinky Winky at a furry convention.

Weiler kept going at it too.

"And why was Seth Rich walking in a neighborhood 30 minutes away from his home — at 4:20 am?" Weiler asked as he was taking fire for regurgitating the nonsense.

"Just honest questions," he tweeted. "I'm not in with the conspiracy."

That old excuse. I'm just asking questions. So if you take the Alex Jones Infowars tin foil hat nonsense and turn it into a question like you're on Cuckoo Jeopardy you're absolved from any responsibility.

Can Hillary Clinton prove she wasn't running a child sex ring out of Comet Ping-pong, the Washington, D.C., pizza parlor? If you phrase it as a question, then you had nothing to do with the unstable North Carolina man who went into the restaurant when it was full of families with his AR-15 trying to find the "truth" about the story.

As Twitterer Jeremy Beckham pointed out, it's not the first time Weiler has peddled half-baked conspiracy nonsense.

"Can America trust Hillary to be honest about her own health?" he tweeted last September. "She's seriously sick, and has been for awhile I think. Whatever she has is episodic. Maybe mini-strokes or Parkinson's."

Weiler isn't a doctor, but he plays one on Twitter.

Then, Tuesday afternoon, Fox News retracted the story, acknowledging it didn't meet their "high degree of editorial scrutiny." But that didn't stop Hannity from continuing vomiting his innuendo via Twitter.

All of this brings me to the point of this rant — and there is a point, I think: We live in the Wild West of news and information and lies and social media, and it's as nasty and addictive and mind-warping as the opioids that Newt Gingrich was warning about.

And you liberals, sitting there with a smug grin on your face, I see you. I see you gleefully retweeting and sharing Louise Mensch's entirely unsourced, hopelessly confused and easily disprovable tweets. No, Orrin Hatch is not already president, as she claimed, there are no secret articles of impeachment and the marshal of the Supreme Court did not inform Trump of the impeachment. Just stop it already.

We've got to be smarter about how we consume information and, more importantly, how we share information, and we all have a responsibility to be discerning and judicious in what we share and, I think, vigilant about pointing out when information is suspect and asking questions when there are doubts.

Speaking of questions, when will we ever get to the bottom of the Fox News cover-up of the murder of Sean Hannity? We deserve answers. Or at least more questions.