I understand that willful ignorance and propagation of false facts is an important issue. However, the reason that the story propagated so widely ends up being mostly political and doesn't really pique my hacker fancy.
When submitting, it would be nice if folks asked the question Would you find this interesting if you were diametrically opposed to the political or religious elements of this article/post? If the answer is yes than it's likely fantastic, if it's no then it's likely to be seen as tea party/%palin%/%obama/SEIU/ACORN/Fox News/MSNBC/ZOMDL!
Hacker News does a pretty good job of weeding this sort of stuff out, and I'm guessing this one will float off soon enough.
The best way to counter a lie is by stating the facts and avoiding mentioning the lie altogether, but in this case the White House refused to divulge a concrete number. The $200 million figure was allowed to propagate unchecked.