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Earlier this week, while Ann Coulter was castigating any conservative who played along with Donald Trump's Birtherism, Sean Hannity whimperingly eagerly agreed (while kowtowing to Coulter) that he would raise with Donald Trump all sorts of the thorny facts that Coulter pointed out in her anti-Birther rant. (You may recall that she blamed the spread of the Trump/Birther story on the "liberal media".)

So of course, when Hannity finally did get around to raising the Birther issue with Trump in his two-part interview, he raised none of those issues and defended not a single fact.

Indeed, it was just a classic Hannity Job. Trump had nothing new to claim -- he just keeps regurgitating the same thoroughly debunked talking points on his theories. And Hannity just let him, of course -- with a little encouragement along the way.

So, in the same spirit, we'll just recap the debunking, as well as the salient points that Donald Trump's Birtherite candidacy raises:

-- Every point or claim that Trump raises is an outright falsehood or an incredibly obtuse distortion that only reveals how stupid and gullible he actually is.

-- In an ordinary universe where up is up and down is down, this would mean Trump would be making the rest of the GOP field look sane and intelligent by contrast.

-- Instead, he is now leading the GOP polls -- which not only must really suck for the usual Republican suspects, but also vividly illustrates the stupidity and gullibility of Republican primary voters.

-- He is quickly becoming the embodiment of Tea Party values: vapidity, irrationality, and arrogantly stupid.

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Ann Coulter had an interesting theory about Donald Trump's Birtherism, which she explained last night to Sean Hannity. It seems that it's all a plot by the liberal media to discredit conservatives:

COULTER: Well, I think maybe I've been watching too much Charlie Sheen, because Donald Trump seems perfectly sane to me. Um, I don't know where he gets this two million dollars Obama has spent to keep his birth certificate quiet -- he posted his birth certificate on his Web page.

I am glad that Donald Trump is bringing it up, so that people who haven't really been paying attention and don't know that the American Spectator, Human Events, Fox News, ummm -- you know, every conservative outlet has already shot down this rumor -- which, by the way, was started by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Now they will have a chance to find out this is Donald Trump's Pierre Salinger moment -- you can't believe everything you read on the Internet, Obama has produced his birth certificate, there were announcements that ran in two contemporaneous Hawaiian newspapers at the time, the head of the Hawaiian medical records has announced, 'I have seen the long form you all want,' um -- I don't know why the long form is considered more credible than the short form, they're both from the same office.

The State Department accepts the short form -- or as we call it, the birth certificate. Hawaii accepts the birth certificate, short form -- so it is a conspiracy theory that won't die on the Internet, but every responsible conservative organization to look at it has shot it down. Which is why you normally hear it being talked about exclusively on the liberal cable stations.

HANNITY: Well, it's an interesting point, and one of the main people demanding it be released is, interestingly, thrill-up-our leg Chris Matthews ... why don't they just release it? It does raise a question. But you bring up good points, not the least of which -- we're going to talk to Donald Trump on this show later this week, we'll ask him -- I think a broader, bigger issue here is that, all of a sudden an issue that was on the periphery a little bit, he hits it, hits it hard, and people take note. So what is it about him that, you know, when he speaks, people listen -- and you know, those issues resonate.

COULTER: Well, two things. I think the main thing is, no conservative who talks on TV or has a column or has a magazine has mentioned the birth certificate, because we've looked at it and have discounted it. You have people who want to get hits to their Website or want to get listeners to their radio show will keep ginning people up about this. But it is one of the rare conservative con -- well, I suppose it's more conservative than liberal, only because it's anti-Obama, but I don't even know that these are conservatives promoting it. As I say, this came out of the Hillary Clinton campaign.

So Donald Trump is the only person who would be invited on a TV show who is pushing the Birther thing. That's why it's getting attention and of course, liberals are delighted. I know Obama is delighted.

...

No, you'll notice who's asking him about it -- it's the liberal media. They want to keep talking about it because it helps discredit all opposition to Obama. There are a lot of reasons to think Obama is a very bad president who is doing very bad things to this country. The idea that he was born in Kenya is not one of them. But it allows liberals, the mainstream media, the White House itself to go, well, the opposition is these crazy birthers.

Well, no it isn't. You haven't heard that on Fox News. You haven't heard it in Human Events and National Review or American Spectator -- all of which have shot it down.

Too bad that the right-wing media themselves kinda shoot down Coulter's theory.

You'll notice, for instance, that Coulter conspicuously omits from her list of "responsible" right-wing news organs WorldNutDaily, the center of the Birther Universe and -- last we checked -- a self-proclaimed "conservative" outlet. Indeed, its writers regularly appear on, you guessed it, Sean Hannity's show.

Oh, and they also publish Coulter's syndicated column.

Indeed, all this rant really proves is that Coulter doesn't watch Fox. Because if she did, she would know that Trump has been given free rein to spout his theories on Fox.

And as if to drive that point home, who should appear on Fox the very next hour? Donald Trump, phoning in to Greta Van Susteren's show and trumpeting his Birther theories yet again -- with only murmurs of contradiction from Van Susteren.

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Fox News is pretty rapidly becoming the Conspiracy Nutcase Network, what with Glenn Beck going all-in as a John Bircher, along with Sean Hannity's headfirst dive into the swamps of Birtherism.

After Hannity's initial foray into Birtherism in defense of Donald Trump on Wednesday, he devoted both of his subsequent "All American Panel" segments to defending Birtherism again. On Thursday, the panelists included former Maryland Gov. Rob Ehrlich, poli-sci prof Caroline Heldman, and ex-Imus producer Bernard McGuirk. It went like pretty much like the first foray:

HANNITY: First of all. What's the deal? Produce the birth certificate it is over and done with. Chris Matthews wants it.

MCGUIRK: This is why Donald Trump should throw his hair into the ring. He legitimized this issue. People say why not just show it. The other thing it took away is that Joy Behar was conspicuously silent. She is a bully she will go over -- she will go after Sharron Angle, Donald Trump she has nothing to say.

...

HANNITY: If I asked for the birth certificate, can I get it?

HELDMAN: I assume that you could, Sean.

HANNITY: Is it go all the way back to 1975?

HELDMAN: Sure.

HANNITY: Could you get your birth certificate?

MCGUIRK: In a heartbeat.

HANNITY: Look, what I like about this, every pejorative, birthers and this and that. Chris Matthews was the guy -- why don't we get rid of it and move the issue aside so it never comes up again?

HELDMAN: How about common sense takes over and it never comes up again.

HANNITY: Wait a minute, but he did talk in his book prayers and he went to a Muslim school and he talk all about all these and he studied the Koran and prayers at sunset were most beautiful things he saw in life. He spent a lot of his youth in Indonesia.

HELDMAN: And?

MCGUIRK: Show the birth certificate and get it over with.

HELDMAN: Wait, what does - have to do with being born in the United States? How is that material to whether or not he was in the United States? What is the logic?

HANNITY: Why won't they release the birth -

HELDMAN: What is the logic?

HANNITY: Why don't they just release it and get it over with. The only reason they don't release it is because it insults him.

Last night, it was more of the same, with a different panel, including civil-rights activist Ron Daniels, Fox contributor Peter Johnson, and Republican "strategist" Dee Dee Benkie. Daniels tried pointing out, repeatedly, that Obama has in fact produced his birth certificate -- but that seemed to fly right over everyone else's head:

HANNITY: Do I think he was [born in America]? Yes. Do I think this is odd that they won't produce the birth certificate? It's beginning to get odd to me.

...

BENKIE: Yeah, but why not produce it? It's so easy. Here it is -- on TV, on billboards, whatever. Why not just bring it out? Why not show it?

DANIELS: It's shown time and time again. Do we trust the Hawaiian authorities or not? I don't understand this. There is a problem here. There's something going on here, that people keep talking about this birth certificate, and there's a significant amount of people believe in it.

HANNITY: Why haven't they just produced the certificate?

DANIELS: They have! They've shown it! You can go see it -- anybody can go see it, just like you can go see a copy of --

HANNITY: That's not true!

BENKIE: That's not true. It's never been out.

HANNITY: Because they've never allowed anybody to see it. That's the point.

BENKIE: It's never been out.

HANNITY: It's never -- see, you're agreeing with me that it's odd.

BENKIE: It is odd. It's very odd.

Yes, very odd, very odd indeed. Odd that no matter how plainly the evidence is given to people like Hannity, they keep insisting that it hasn't been presented.

OK, I'm going to write this verrrrry slooooowwly, just so Hannity and his panelists and the likeminded Trump fans don't miss anything:

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We warned this was coming: On Friday, Glenn Beck devoted his entire hour to promoting the conspiracy theories of G. Edward Griffin, a John Bircher and 9/11 truther whose book, The Creature from Jekyll Island, attacks the Federal Reserve as a nefarious cabal intent on enslaving and destroying America.

It was quite a performance: Among other things we learned from Griffin was that he believes there is no actual gold at Fort Knox (maybe Goldfinger rendered it radioactive, eh?) and that there is a real inflation rate of around 20 percent right now.

Well, as we explained already:

Beck, as we all know, has previously demonstrated a fondness for the Birch Society, and this is consistent with that: Griffin, after all, was a close personal friend and longtime associate of Birch Society founder Robert Welch, and wrote a popular Birch book published in 1964, The Fearful Master: A Second Look at the United Nations.

The Creature from Jekyll Island is in many ways a compendium of previous works claiming that the Federal Reserve is a fundamentally illegitimate -- and therefore deeply nefarious -- organization. Most of these theories were deeply anti-Semitic in nature, since they depicted the Fed's bankers as part of a Jewish cabal intent on destroying white American society. What sets Griffin's work apart is that -- like most Birch texts, which assiduously avoided anti-Semitism -- he manages to scrub out the anti-Semitic elements while keeping the paranoid conspiracist elements intact.

Since its publication in 1994, Griffin's book has become a popular text for a large number of right-wing extremists, particularly tax protesters and Patriot movement believers. Griffin himself was involved in organizing a gathering on Jekyll Island last year that the Southern Poverty Law Center credits with helping revive the militia movement.

It has been debunked thoroughly, of course -- probably most notably by historian Gerry Rough, whose three-part series on the origins of the Fed, "Another Twist on the Jacksonian Bank War," pretty thoroughly reveal just how fraudulent Griffin's text really is. You can read it here: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

[Rough has debunked Griffin further in other essays as well: here, here, and here.]

Meanwhile, Media Matters' research team has a complete rundown on Griffin. From an earlier piece:

Griffin, in addition to spinning conspiracy theories about the Fed, is also a 9-11 truther and has written extensively about the U.S. government's "facilitation" of the attacks. In April 2008, Griffin appeared on the radio program of conspiracist Alex Jones and claimed that he predicted just days after 9-11 that "the FBI and the intelligence agencies of the federal government had advance knowledge of this attack but did nothing to stop it," and that he was proven right. He also is -- or, at least, was -- a member of the ultra-right wing John Birch Society. He wrote a 1970 pamphlet entitled "This is the John Birch Society: An Invitation to Join," and a 1975 book entitled The Life and Words of Robert Welch: Founder of the John Birch Society.

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Well, we've always known that Sean Hannity has a penchant for nuzzling right up next to conspiracy theories from folks like noted Birther Jerome Corsi and promoting them in a secondhand fashion without completely diving off the deep end, as his early-evening colleague at Fox is inclined to do.

But last night, defending Donald Trump for his admission that he believes in the Obama birth-certificate theories, Hannity dove right in and embraced his inner Birther. It was something to behold.

Terry Krepel and David Shere at Media Matters have the complete rundown:

HANNITY: What do you think about this birth certificate issue? I mean, it has not been my main issue, but it kind of does get a little odd here after a while. Can't they just produce it and we move on?

REP. MICHAEL BURGESS (R-TX): Well, obviously, there's some value to the White House not producing it. I don't know what that could be. This easily could be ended, could have been ended a couple of years ago. I don't know --

HANNITY: Jerry, that's a reasonable position. Is he right?

JERRY SPRINGER (talk show host): Well, no. I'll tell you why.

HANNITY: Release -- do you have your birth certificate?

SPRINGER: No, I finally -- well because I was born in England, and it was during the war, and really, I had to go through a whole process for my Social Security -- because I'm on Medicare now. I had to finally get --

LEEANN TWEEDEN (model and Fox Sports host): You had to track it down, and you did, right? And you had to produce it, right?

SPRINGER: But i found it. I found it. I found it. But because I was born in England, I can't be president anyway.

The best moment came when Springer tried to point out the obvious -- no previous candidate for the presidency had faced these kinds of questions about his citizenship, and it is no coincidence that it happens to be the first African American president. Hannity hastily sprang into action -- block that point!

SPRINGER: But you know what, I understand why there's a resistance to it.

HANNITY: Why?

SPRINGER: Because isn't this interesting? Of all our 43 presidents, of the 43 presidents --

HANNITY: Don't bring up race. Do not bring up race. Do not bring up race. It is a constitutional requirement.

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Glenn Beck has done lots of mainstreaming extremist beliefs and ideas in his two-plus years at Fox News -- especially far-right ideas that have circulated for years among Patriot-movement militiamen and John Birch Society members, from various "New World Order" theories and claims to "Tenther" theories to his abortive flirtation with FEMA concentration-camp theories.

Judging from the hints he's been dropping on his Fox News show all this week, on Friday he's going to once again dive into the deep, dark and murky waters of classic far-right conspiracism of the Bircher kind. He dropped hints the other day while discussing the "Liberty Dollar" scamsters -- claiming, on the one hand, that he knew ahead of time that what these characters were doing was breaking the law, but simultaneously, they were telling the truth when it came to the evil Federal Reserve.

BECK: Well, this guy was misguided, but he wasn't trying to bring down the United States -- at least, from what he told me. He believed the Fed was destroying the dollar -- and, really? That's a hard stretch, isn't it?

You, by the way, have to watch this show on Friday -- because there is some truth to that. The unbelievable history of the Fed. The, uh -- what is it, the uh, 'Monster,' is that what it was called? The Monster? The Creature of Jekyll Island. We will give you the truth and none of the crazy conspiracy theories on the Fed on Friday. Anyway.

Beck is referencing one of the widest-read conspiracist works about the Federal Reserve, G. Edward Griffin's The Creature from Jekyll Island, and it appears -- vows to eschew conspiracy theories notwithstanding -- that he intends to cite it as a credible source, much as he did with Jonah Goldberg's fraudulent Liberal Fascism thesis in his "documentary" exposing the nefarious fascist roots of modern progressivism. In that case, he promised to eschew "conspiracy theories" too.

Beck, as we all know, has previously demonstrated a fondness for the Birch Society, and this is consistent with that: Griffin, after all, was a close personal friend and longtime associate of Birch Society founder Robert Welch, and wrote a popular Birch book published in 1964, The Fearful Master: A Second Look at the United Nations.

The Creature from Jekyll Island is in many ways a compendium of previous works claiming that the Federal Reserve is a fundamentally illegitimate -- and therefore deeply nefarious -- organization. Most of these theories were deeply anti-Semitic in nature, since they depicted the Fed's bankers as part of a Jewish cabal intent on destroying white American society. What sets Griffin's work apart is that -- like most Birch texts, which assiduously avoided anti-Semitism -- he manages to scrub out the anti-Semitic elements while keeping the paranoid conspiracist elements intact.

Since its publication in 1994, Griffin's book has become a popular text for a large number of right-wing extremists, particularly tax protesters and Patriot movement believers. Griffin himself was involved in organizing a gathering on Jekyll Island last year that the Southern Poverty Law Center credits with helping revive the militia movement.

It has been debunked thoroughly, of course -- probably most notably by historian Gerry Rough, whose three-part series on the origins of the Fed, "Another Twist on the Jacksonian Bank War," pretty thoroughly reveal just how fraudulent Griffin's text really is. You can read it here: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

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Yesterday we had another act of violence by a right-wing extremist intent on attacking and harming the government, inflamed by far-right conspiracy theories about 9/11 and other supposed instances of government "tyranny":

Internet postings linked to the suspected gunman in a Pentagon subway shooting suggest long-held frustration with the government's reach into the private life of Americans.

The suspect, John Patrick Bedell, 36, died after exchanging gunfire with two police officers. He spent weeks driving to the Capital area from the West Coast, authorities said Friday.

A blog connected to him via the social networking site LinkedIn outlines a growing distrust of the federal government. The blog suggests a criminal enterprise run out of the government could have staged the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

It was the latest batch of conspiracy-laden Internet postings to surface since Thursday night's shooting.

Bedell died Thursday night from head wounds received in a volley of fire with police. Richard Keevill, chief of Pentagon police, said the two injured officers and another officer who came to their assistance fired upon Bedell at the subway entrance into the Pentagon building in Arlington, Va.

"He came here from California," Keevill said. "We were able to identify certain locations that he spent that last several weeks making his way from the West coast to the East coast."

Keevill described Bedell as "very well educated" and well-dressed, saying Bedell was wearing a suit, armed with two 9 millimeter semiautomatic weapons and carried "many magazines" of ammunition. There was more ammunition in Bedell's car, which authorities found in a local parking garage, Keevill said.

[UPDATE: Think Progress has more on Bedell's background as a right-wing extremist.]

NBC's Jim Miklaszewski assured us this morning that there was no indication this was "terrorism." Likewise, the Associated Press report had a similar assurance:

Investigators have found no immediate connection to terrorism. The attack that superficially wounded two officers guarding the massive Defense Department headquarters appears to be a case of "a single individual who had issues," Richard Keevill, chief of Pentagon police, said Friday.

Excuse me, but WTF?

It seems to be the new standard among journalists that terrorism is now defined only as conspiracy-based international terrorism. Lone-wolf domestic terrorism? That's now just "a single individual who had issues."

You remember when an anti-tax radical flew his plane into IRS offices in Austin a couple of weeks ago in an attempt to blow those offices up, the Foxite media were eager to proclaim that it was not an act of terrorism, too.

As we explained then:

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BREAKING NEWS: Glenn Beck is certifiably insane!!!

Oh. You knew that.

Yeah, we could run that lede just about every day, actually. But this week, Beck has been whipping it to another level of Bats--t Crazy.

Now he's predicting IMMINENT VIOLENT REVOLUTION led by those evil progressive radicals who hate the Republic inside the Obama administration. In case he didn't notice, the actual dynamic in Washington these days is actually just a wee bit different, since it's become manifestly clear that President Obama is anything BUT a radical revolutionary. But hey, nothing ever deters the intrepid Beck in the pursuit of his apocalyptic conspiracy theories.

Well, let's be clear: Beck has been warning about this dire imminent threat for quite awhile now. You'll recall he predicted last spring that eeevil progressives were planning a 'summer of rage' filled with violence, death and chaos.

Yeah, that really panned out, eh? Instead we got Byron Williams. Hmmmm.

This theory really is just a warmed-over version of the IMMINENT DIRE THREAT Beck has been shouting at us about since he signed onto Fox. It's become repetitive but more intensified, a manifestation of Beck's steadily creeping paranoia.

After all, he's been theorizing that Obama's band of administration radicals are planning a "global redistribution of the wealth" for a long time -- often flavored with black-helicopter militia theories about a "New World Order". He's been predicting George Soros would try to kill him, and warning that the eeeevil Left is plotting to frame the Tea Partiers for an act of domestic terrorist violence, adding that if right-wing violence does break out, it will have been provoked by Obama and the liberals.

More recently, there have been such similarly credible theories that the European Union Parliament building was intended to resemble the Tower of Babel, and that the evil Holocaust survivor George Soros is plotting to take over the world.

That provoked this rant, earlier this week, when he demanded an apology from Forbes for correctly calling him out for his vicious, classically anti-Semitic smear of Soros:

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As you can see, it was a pretty complete meltdown. We could've run today's lede then, too.

This can only end badly for Fox. And they will richly deserve it.

As Byron Williams put it:

"Beck is gonna deny everything about violent approach and deny everything about conspiracies, but he'll give you every reason to believe it."

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UPDATE: The Supreme Court rejected the claim today without comment. [H/t marionetta]

We've always said that wingnuts never, ever give up. And that would be especially true of the wingnuttiest of the current crop, the Birthers -- because their theory has been so manifestly disproven so many times that you'd think they might have a clue by now. But no.

Now they're expanding their theory. They're arguing that Obama, per the constitutional requirement that he be a "natural born citizen", is disqualified from such status because his father was a British subject of Kenyan birth.

What's really funny about this theory is that these fetishists of all things from the Founding Fathers would thus have disqualified one of the leading founders, Thomas Jefferson, from the presidency.

What's perhaps not so funny about it is that the Supreme Court has this case on its docket.

Unsurprisingly, the wingnuts at WorldNetDaily are all over the story:

The Supreme Court conferred today on whether arguments should be heard on the merits of Kerchner v. Obama, a case challenging whether President Barack Obama is qualified to serve as president because he may not be a "natural-born citizen" as required by Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 of the U.S. Constitution.

Unlike other eligibility cases that have reached the Supreme Court, Kerchner vs. Obama focuses on the "Vattel theory," which argues that the writers of the Constitution believed the term "natural-born citizen" to mean a person born in the United States to parents who were both American citizens.

"This case is unprecedented," said Mario Apuzzo, the attorney bringing the suit. "I believe we presented an ironclad case. We've shown standing, and we've shown the importance of the issue for the Supreme Court. There's nothing standing in their way to grant us a writ of certiorari."

There really shouldn't be much to worry about here, truthfully: the lower courts have all tossed out this suit, and indeed the Third Circuit Appeals court ordered Apuzzo to explain why he shouldn't be sanctioned for filing a frivolous lawsuit (an order that was later vacated.

On the other hand, considering that these appeals were tossed not on the merits of the case but on the lack of standing that Charles Kerchner actually had in filing the suit, and the fact that the Roberts Court has shown a disturbing tendency to liberalize standing when it suits the conservative wing, maybe we shouldn't be so blithe.

And what's the basis of their theory? Back to WND:

Apuzzo is arguing the "Vattel theory," which asserts that the term "natural-born citizen" as used in the Constitution was defined by Swiss writer Emer de Vattel. Vattel, whose work, "The Law of Nations," was widely known and respected by the founding fathers, used the term to mean an individual born of two citizens.

According to Apuzzo, Congress and the courts have addressed the question of who can be an American citizen, for example regarding former slaves, Asian immigrants, and American Indians. However, the term "natural-born citizen" has never been altered.

"The courts and Congress have never changed the definition," said Apuzzo. "The founding fathers understood that the commander-in-chief of the armed forces needed to have two American citizens as parents so that American values would be imparted to him."

Apuzzo said the Supreme Court had clearly accepted Vattel's definition of "natural-born citizen" in "dicta," or statements made in opinions on cases addressing other matters. He cited Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall's opinion in the 1814 "Venus" case, in which Marshall endorses Vattel's definition.

This is pretty odd reasoning. Especially when you consider that the same standard would have disqualified Thomas Jefferson -- whose mother, Jane Randolph Jefferson, was born in London, England:

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OK, here's your daily bit of comedy, courtesy of Glenn Beck ...

Yesterday, Beck brought his Black Robe pal, Rabbi Daniel Lapin, on to support his latest theory: that the new European Union Parliament building in Strasbourg, France, is actually designed to look like the Tower of Babel. Or at least, one well-known version of it.

Beck showed the two buildings side by side, then launched into a long disquisition on the Biblical meaning of the Tower of Babel (zzzzzzzzz) and then wrapped it all up thus:

Beck: You're not saying, Rabbi, that they intentionally are building the Tower of Babel.

Lapin: I think they are. I really do. I do believe and was told that the design of the headquarters of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, was -- designers were asked to make it resemble the Tower of Babel.

Beck: They said -- because we called -- we tried to verify, and what they say is, [laughs] they're just reflecting like the Coliseum.

Lapin: Yeah, that's what we want to build in Europe -- right? A place where Christians got fed to lions.

Too funny. Of course, as a matter of fact, as the Wikipedia entry notes (citing a press release): "The architects were inspired by Roman amphitheatres."

Well, duh:

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