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Mark Steyn is filling in for Sean Hannity this week on Fox, and he wanted to have an in-depth, thoughtful discussion of the START nuclear-missile treaty. Naturally, this meant he brought on wingnut actor Jon Voight, who springs to mind immediately as an careful and knowledgeable analyst of nuclear issues, thanks to his incisive portrayals of FDR in Pearl Harbor and Jonas Hodges in 24.

And it was deeply insightful indeed. It opened up a tremendous window on the full-blown idiocy and paranoia of the wingnut Right. F'r instance:

VOIGHT: And now I hear Obama trying to convince the American people that if we give up our nuclear weapons, this will set a fine example and all other countries will follow suit. What a dangerous and naive notion that is. If President Reagan wasn't such a powerful force of strength, we never would have seen Premier Gorbachev take down the Berlin Wall.

In reality, of course, it was Reagan who opened the negotiations with the Soviets in 1982 that eventually led to the first START treaty, ratified in 1992 under George H.W. Bush. Reagan often remarked in his speeches that his "ultimate goal" was the "total elimination of nuclear weapons."

Maybe Jon was too busy on the set of Lookin' To Get Out back then or something. Because he nattered on in this vein for awhile -- including this utterly incoherent bit:

VOIGHT: Well, our President Kennedy in September of 1961 and by the way, of course he served in the World War II nearly losing his life and he stated that American military might is the only way to keep our freedom. Of course, President Reagan was of the same point of view. And thank God he had the foresight not to sign away our national missile defense when he saw the world full of presidents and future threats from multiple nuclear powers.

Steyn obviously found this deeply insightful:

STEYN: Do you think the Republicans are going to stand firm on this? The president tonight seems to be pretty confident he can get enough Republicans to get on board with this thing to pass it with 67 votes. Are you confident the Republican Party will stand firm?

VOIGHT: Well, I certainly hope, so. And I think, again, a lot of it has to do with the American people. Get on the phones, folks, and make sure that we encourage our senators to reject this thing. You know, I don't -- we have seen this before. We have seen it coming towards Christmas as well. This idea that we push something through and people are thinking about, you know, presents for their grandchildren and wanting to get out of town, they come in and no one is thorough in their questioning or their reading of the materials. And they push something through. I don't know how many more wrong Obama policies we need to see before we wake up to the possibility that this man is capable of destroying our country.

The whole segment reminded me of an earlier Jon Voight performance:

1st Lt. Milo Minderbinder: I want to serve this to the men. Taste it and let me know what you think.

[Yossarian takes a bite]

Yossarian: What is it?

1st Lt. Milo Minderbinder: Chocolate covered cotton.

Yossarian: What are you, crazy?

1st Lt. Milo Minderbinder: No good, huh?

Yossarian: For Christ's sake, you didn't even take the seeds out.

1st Lt. Milo Minderbinder: Is it really that bad?

Yossarian: It's cotton!

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Everyone (except Shep Smith) at Fox News, including various reporters, spent the day yesterday whining about how mean the White House was being to them, telling everyone that they're a propaganda arm of the Republican Party. Guess the truth hurts. (More on that in a bit.)

It's funny they should say that. Because that same day, every single one of Fox's prime-time "opinion show" anchors devoted time and energy to running down President Obama -- and the Nobel committee -- for his just-announced Peace Prize.

Sean Hannity was so worked up, he devoted two whole segments to the subject, featuring the gnome who lives under the bridge Dick Morris and Mark Steyn. (You'll love Hannity's definition of "peace.") Bernie Goldberg ran through their comparable records of non-accomplishment and announced that he would win the prize next year. But the real corker, of course, came from Glenn Beck, who was able to figure out just what Obama's Nobel Peace Prize really meant:

It may be more revealing on how Europe and the rest of the world views Obama. He [Obama] is dismantling the United States one piece at a time.

And doing so, evidently, at the behest of his European masters. (But wait! I thought he was born in Kenya!)

This really is getting unseemly. A little carping could be expected, but for God's sake, can't any of these people get some perspective? The Nobel Peace Prize is one of the world's great honors, and it's an honor for it to go to an American.

Hannity, for instance, harps on the fact that Obama's nomination came only 12 days after he was inaugurated. But the committee keeps reviewing nominees -- including their current activities -- up until the final vote, which took place not long ago. So Hannity's point is a nonsequitur.

What never seems to occur to any of them is the obvious, simple and clear reason that Obama won the Nobel: He won the Presidency of the United States -- and in so doing, ended conservative-movement rule in America.

The entire world could see that the Bush administration, enabled by a Republican Congress, and fueled by an increasingly bellicose and irrational talk-show was the greatest threat to global peace since the fall of the Berlin Wall -- outpacing even the terrorist disturbances of Al Qaeda, particularly in lives lost. Nor would conservatives give up their hold on power readily; defeating them was no mean feat.

Entertaining such thoughts, though, would paralyze any well-trained right-winger in a fit of cognitive dissonance, so it never comes up on places like Fox.

Michael Moore may have put it best:

The simple fact that he was elected was reason enough for him to be the recipient of this year's Nobel Peace Prize.

Because on that day the murderous actions of the Bush/Cheney years were totally and thoroughly rebuked. One man -- a man who opposed the War in Iraq from the beginning -- offered to end the insanity. The world has stood by in utter horror for the past eight years as they watched the descendants of Washington, Lincoln and Jefferson light the fuse of our own self-destruction. We flipped off the nations on this planet by abandoning Kyoto and then proceeded to melt eight more years worth of the polar ice caps. We invaded two nations that didn't attack us, failed to find the real terrorists and, in effect, ignited our own wave of terror. People all over the world wondered if we had gone mad.

And if all that wasn't enough, the outgoing Joker presided over the worst global financial collapse since the Great Depression.

So, yeah, at precisely 11:00pm ET on November 4, 2008, Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. And the 66 million people who voted for him won it, too. By the time he took the stage at midnight ET in the Grant Park Historic Hippie Battlefield in downtown Chicago, billions of people around the globe were already breathing a huge sigh of relief. It was as if, in that instant, one man did bring the promise of peace to the world -- and most were ready to go wherever he wanted to go to achieve that end. Never before had the election of one man made every other nation feel like they had won, too. When you've got billions of people ready, willing and able to join a cause like this, well, a prize in Oslo is the least that you deserve.

It's also worth noting that the Peace Prize historically has gone to those -- like Martin Luther King -- who have produced important transformative steps in the furtherance of civil rights and the healing of the racial divide, which has produced so much misery and inflicted so much violence in America alone. Obama's election as the first African-American president represents just such a moment, and he deserves recognition for that alone as well.

The Fox folks need to get a grip. And if they wonder why the White House sees them as reflexively opposed to everything and anything Obama does, they should just play the above video as a reminder.

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If the Republican Party wants to go on a listening tour to figure out what they need to do, they may start turning off their radios and televisions too. Every day we post about the absurdity that is the Republican Party and every day a completely new mind-numbing smear comes out.

I understand what they are doing. They feel if they keep chipping away at President Obama with nonsensical complaints, it will slowly erode his popularity. The problem they face is that they look like loons doing it, and all the polls point to the same conclusion. It's good for ratings on FOX, because those uber-loons are watching the little horde of Republican lunatics in action with a fervent glee, but mainstream America is laughing at them.

The new one is that Obama had the nerve, the nerve I tell you! of ordering Dijon mustard with his overcooked burger, and the media is covering up that fact.

As usual, Sean Hannity and the right wingnutosphere are all over it like Dijon on fries.

Following President Obama's May 5 visit to Ray's Hell Burger in Arlington, Virginia, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Rush Limbaugh Show guest host Mark Steyn criticized Obama as an elitist because he ordered a burger with "spicy mustard" or "Dijon mustard." Hannity claimed that Obama ordered a "fancy burger" with a "very special condiment," while Steyn asserted Obama is trying "to enlighten us" through his order. Ingraham asked of Obama: "What kind of man orders a cheeseburger without ketchup but Dijon mustard? ... The guy orders a cheeseburger without ketchup? What is that?" In their discussions of Obama's burger order, Hannity, Ingraham, and Steyn all referenced a Grey Poupon commercial featuring actors portraying wealthy British men expressing desire for the mustard.

I happen to like the spicy taste of Dijon too. Hey. I noticed there's a Hate Hannity Hotline. I hope I make it there sometimes. He's too cowardly to have me on his show, so I'd really like to make the Hotline.

TIME magazine rips the Republican Party apart as Rep. Patrick McHenry says that Reaganism is dead.

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Colin Powell's recent remarks thumping on Republicans for wandering off into the wilderness under the guidance of people like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter -- not to mention Karl Rove and Sean Hannity -- really seem to have upset at least Limbaugh and Hannity.

Limbaugh shot back by telling Powell to go join the Democrats. (And you wouldn't blame Powell if he took the defacto head of the conservative movement up on the invitation.)

Now, just for the record, here's what Powell actually said:

Powell said the GOP is "getting smaller and smaller" and "that's not good for the nation." He also said he hopes that emerging GOP leaders, such as House Minority Whip Cantor, will not keep repeating mantras of the far right.

"The Republican Party is in deep trouble," Powell told corporate security executives at a conference in Washington sponsored by Fortify Software Inc. The party must realize that the country has changed, he said. "Americans do want to pay taxes for services," he said. "Americans are looking for more government in their life, not less."

...He blasted radio commentator Rush Limbaugh, saying he does not believe that Limbaugh or conservative icon Ann Coulter serve the party well. He said the party lacks a "positive" spokesperson. "I think what Rush does as an entertainer diminishes the party and intrudes or inserts into our public life a kind of nastiness that we would be better to do without," Powell said.

He also said that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, McCain's running mate last year, is "a very accomplished person" but became "a very polarizing figure." He said the polarization was created by Palin's advisers.

Powell said he does not want Republicans to turn into Democrats but rather to build a vibrant party.

Hannity responded by devoting the better part of his Fox News show last night to the subject. First he had on Karl Rove to talk about it, which of course meant we got a Rove Moment: When he informed us that Powell's remarks about the toxic value of Limbaugh's hatemongering amounted to trying to silence Limbaugh. Because exercising your free-speech rights actually becomes censorship and suppression if you happen to say anything unpleasant about Republicans, no matter how truthful.

This, coming from the guy who never hesitated to suggest that Democrats were treasonous for criticizing George W. Bush's handling of the Iraq war. Or anything else.

Then Hannity brought on famous non-American Mark Steyn to further agree with him that the problem with Republicans is that they aren't conservative enough. (We like this advice, because it is a sure loser for the GOP.)

In any event, these exchanges produced two classic moments from Hannity of the pure, distilled Planet Wingnuttia worldview. (It's always fascinating, because it's such an alien world from the one the rest of us live in, and it has a certain amusement value as well.)

Hannity [to Rove]: He attacks Rush Limbaugh, and we'll get into that in just a second here. And I'm sitting back and he talked about the nastiness of Rush on the radio, which I don't hear, ever.

[...]

Hannity [to Steyn]: Can you name one area now where Republicans are more conservative than they were when Reagan was president? Because I can't.

Um, the hard part is figuring out where to start. There are so many to choose from.

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Global-relations and military-tactics expert Glenn Beck and his equally qualified guest, famous-for-being-famous Canadian Mark Steyn, held forth yesterday on how America can solve the military situation in Afghanistan and the Middle East generally:

Beck: Here's the thing, Mark, I really think that if we're gonna fight a war -- and that's why I say, 'Kill them faster than they can kill you' -- if we're going to fight a war, why aren't we giving our military absolutely everything they need, go into Afghanistan, and just kick their butt. And then come home. So that way, everybody in the rest of the world goes, 'Oh jeez, I don't want to screw with them, because they're really serious.'

Real-world answer: Maybe because "just kicking their butt" in a tactical-landscape nightmare like Afghanistan is easier said than accomplished, unless you're talking about just dropping a nuke on them -- which of course has global complications all its own. Otherwise, just going into Afghanistan and "kicking butt" and then leaving won't solve the problem, because Al Qaeda is based as much these days in Pakistan as it is in Afghanistan.

But as usual, Glenn Beck likes to keep things simple. Real simple.

And so does Steyn, who seems to have gathered his talking points at Richard Nixon's knee:

Steyn: Because they know, and our enemies know, that when the United States goes into battle, it fights with one hand tied behind its back. So in your ass-kicking terms, we're not using the full force of the foot. We're using the little toe.

And our enemies realize that. They see the way we go into paroxysms of guilt over Abu Ghraib and Gitmo and all the rest.

Beck: Well, I mean, Abu Ghraib was ... I mean, dontcha think?

Steyn: Yeah, it was a guy -- what, whatever it was, the banana and the Victoria's Secret panties. Big deal! That's nothing compared to what goes on in the --

Beck: Wait a minute, wait a minute. I'll never get that Victoria's Secret panties thing out of my head now.

Yeah, it was just a freakin' holiday there, Mark.

Then again, this is the same cretin who penned this similar line:

The merest glimpse of a U.S. servicewoman leading an Abu Ghraib inmate around with girlie knickers on his head was enough to prompt calls for Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation, and for Ted Kennedy to charge that Saddam’s torture chambers were now open “under new management.”

Oh, and here's something else for Steyn and Beck -- who were arguing that Obama was going soft on terrorists -- to chew on: The 2006 National Intelligence Estimate:

A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.

... Previous drafts described actions by the United States government that were determined to have stoked the jihad movement, like the indefinite detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, and some policy makers argued that the intelligence estimate should be more focused on specific steps to mitigate the terror threat.

Maybe Canadian right-wingers don't worry about what that all means. After all, hey, it's not their problem, is it?

It ain't pretty, folks.

The top five: Limbaugh, Coulter, Malkin, Mark Steyn, and Newt?

And whoa: George W. Bush got more votes than Hannity and O'Reilly combined. Why didn't Hannity get Katherine Harris to do the vote tally for him?

A big hat tip to Liberal Values, who has more details here.

Tbogg: "Mark Steyn is a sad, middle-aged loser guy"

I'm sure Jacoby would do whatever they said and I mean anything if they held a gun to his head. These cowards know no bounds,

Fox News reporter Steve Centanni and photographer Olaf Wiig announced their acceptance of Islam on a videotape released by their kidnappers -- ``because they had the guns," Centanni later said, ``and we didn't know what the hell was going on." Whether their acquiescence was an act of cowardice or of prudence, reasonable people can debate. Clearly it wasn't their only choice. If I were ever told, with a gun to my head, to recite the Shahada or die, I hope I would have the courage to take the bullet...

The Italian that died is an incredible story, but surely any sane person would realize it was a propaganda film and understand the duress these reporters felt. He's so brave with a keyboard in his hand. Let's get this straight. All reporters should have a James Bond type cyanide pill implanted in their teeth so they can kill themselves from now on. Has Jacoby got one? Here's his email jacoby@globe.com. He's so proud of the article, but be nice... Mark Steyn is no better.

I've been looking for a little help and Glenn has agreed to come on and occasionally post for C&L. Here's a sample if you haven't had a chance to read him thus far:

"Among Bush followers, Mark Steyn is one of the most revered columnists around. The minute he has a new column up, they all run around celebrating it as the latest work of towering genius Not coincidentally, he's also one of the most dishonest commentators around...read on."

Media Matters: Top 12 media myths on BUSHCO's spying.

Ezra Klein has NSA Questions, Bob has a visual aid, and Blah3.com says Bolton's NSA requests are key.

Wash Park Prophet: One more reason not to watch Fox

elementropy: Wingnut All-Star...Mark Steyn

This Modern World: The Year In Review (part 1)

This Modern World: The Year In Review (part 1)