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Now, that's what I call a conspiracy theory: Andrew Breitbart told Glenn Beck on Friday that he thinks that Oprah Winfrey is the real power behind the Obama throne:

Breitbart: Well, this doesn’t surprise me. Does it surprise you? This is the Oprah Winfrey presidency. She was his biggest supporter, and I think that she’s been behind the scenes orchestrating this presidency as a media presidency, photo ops, giving billions of dollars of gifts away to people and to companies like General Electric, and until the mainstream media starts realizing --

Beck: Wait a minute. Are you suggesting that Barack Obama walks into a room and goes, "GE CEOs, look under your seat!"

Breitbart: I think that's exactly what it is.

Beck: You've got a bailout. Is that what you're suggesting?

Breitbart: That's exactly what I'm suggesting. It is the Oprah Winfrey presidency.

You know, it's funny: Fox never featured hosts who were upset about Fox' cozy relationships with the Republicans who made Rupert Murdoch's massive American media acquisitions possible for the past decade.

It never featured reports or talk-show hosts who even talked about former GE CEO Jack Welch's cozy relationship with the GOP and the Bush administration earlier this decade.

Evidently, they only object to such political coziness when Democrats do it. OK, we got that.

But what, exactly, does Oprah have to do with GE? The only business connection is that NBC bought Oxygen, the network Oprah cofounded, in 2007. But GE does not own Oprah's production company or have much of a relationship. (Her long-running TV show is distributed through King World Productions, a CBS operation.)

These people having been breathing some kind of exhaust and it's messing with their heads. Probably their own.

Of course, in the case of Breitbart, he's just being his usual a-hole self. Nothing new there.

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One of conservatives' least endearing social traits is that It's All About Them. Always.

In the video above, you can see everyone from Rush Limbaugh to the usual Fox talking heads ranting and whining that the recent internal Department of Homeland Security intelligence report on right-wing domestic terrorists was inspired by government fear over today's Tea Parties.

As if. Do any of these people have any idea how long it takes to compile this kind of threat assessment? Ah, but how can we forget? On Planet Wingnuttia, all the world revolves around them and their serial dumbassery.

Minnesota Independent has a wrapup on all the right-wing bloggers who leapt to the assumption that the DHS report was aimed at the "tea parties."

Then there's Lou Dobbs:

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He's so certain it's All About Him, he even put up one of his fake polls asking if someone like himself might be a domestic terrorist:

Our poll question tonight is: Do you think a person concerned about borders and ports that are unsecured, illegal immigration, Second Amendment rights or returning veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is likely or even possibly probable, as the Department of Homeland Security suggests to be a right-wing extremist? Yes or no. Cast your vote at LouDobbs.com. We'll have the results here later in the broadcast.

OK, here's a cluestick for the wingnuts: This report, and the timing of its release, is not about Tea Parties. It's also not about Latino-bashers, except to the extent that Latino-bashers like Dobbs get the serious haters all worked up.

It's about Richard Poplawski. And the dozens, if not hundreds, of little latent Poplawskis out there, waiting to pop off and kill more police officers, or just as likely, a crowd of innocent bystanders.

Of course, you all would like us to forget about Richard Poplawski as soon as possible, wouldn't you, given the mainstream right's culpability in that case?

The Department of Homeland Security more than likely couldn't give a rat's patoot about today's right-wing Tea Tantrums, because they're mostly exercises in futility and stupidity anyway.

But I'll tell you who they do care about: the people in uniform who go out every day and put their lives on the line to keep you and I and our families and neighborhoods safe -- that is, the men and women in law enforcement. People like those three officers in Pittsburgh, who had no reason to suspect a killer was about to ambush them.

A recent study by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism lays out in painful detail the very real threat that right-wing extremists pose to people in law enforcement:

Research led by Dr. Joshua D. Freilich (John Jay College, CUNY) and Dr. Steven Chermak (Michigan State University) and funded by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) has revealed a violent history of fatal attacks against law enforcement officers in the United States by individuals who adhere to far-right ideology.

* In the United States, 42 law enforcement officers have been killed in 32 incidents in which at least one of the suspects was a far-rightist since 1990.

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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?

[H/t Blue Gal]

Alan Scherstuhl at the Village Voice's Runnin' Scared blog recently made available some prime audio clips of Bill O'Reilly reading aloud from what is universally acclaimed as his creepiest (not to mention most hypocrisy-inducing) book:

That honor goes to Those Who Trespass, his 1998 novel about an O'Reilly-esque TV journalist who is trained by an Irish Republican Army terrorist to kill the people who deserve it the most: the broadcast news bastards who interfered with the O'Reilly character's career. It's personal on the political level, too -- his victims includes a powerful "bitch" named Hillary and a fat "slob" named Martin Moore.

The prime lines:

"Say baby, put down that pipe and get my pipe up."

"I would like you to unhook your bra and let it slide down your arms. You can keep your shirt on."

"Cup your hands under your breasts and hold them for ten seconds."

"Off with those pants."

"I wish I were a lesbian."

So BlueGal concocted the mashup above, with O'Reilly's appearance on The View. Enjoy.

BTW, the plot of Those Who Trespass is something else:

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Look, I don't think I've ever urged anyone to take Dick Cheney's advice on anything. But the morons/Republicans in the Senate really might want to pay attention at least:

Bush personally lobbied recalcitrant Senate Republicans after Vice President Dick Cheney failed to round up support Wednesday during a contentious two-hour meeting.

"If we don't do this, we will be known as the party of Herbert Hoover forever," Cheney told them, according to a Senate Republican aide, evoking the president whose inaction is widely blamed for helping trigger the Great Depression in the early 1930s.

Well, as Steve Benen acidly observes, that seems to be a mantle they wish to bear proudly.

Adds Benen:

This, for lack of a better word, is madness. But what I really don't understand is why the rest of the Republican caucus in the Senate went along with this. Corker, Shelby, and DeMint are three far-right lawmakers from the Deep South, but they were only able to pull this off last night because there weren't enough reasonable Republicans left.

Now, ironically enough, their only hope of escaping the Hoover Mantle lies with the Modern Hoover himself, George W. Bush.

Digby nails it:

At this point, the only route they see to power is to make things worse and blame it on the Democrats. What else do they have?

It seems the outer fringes of wingnuttia are still clinging to a last little acorn of a conspiracy theory as their last hope for stopping Barack Obama from becoming president. It comes down to this:

The U.S. Supreme Court will consider Friday whether to take up a lawsuit challenging President-elect Barack Obama's U.S. citizenship, a continuation of a New Jersey case embraced by some opponents of Obama's election.

The meeting of justices will coincide with a vigil by the filer's supporters in Washington on the steps of the nation's highest court.

The suit originally sought to stay the election, and was filed on behalf of Leo Donofrio against New Jersey Secretary of State Nina Mitchell Wells.

Legal experts say the appeal has little chance of succeeding, despite appearing on the court's schedule. Legal records show it is only the tip of an iceberg of nationwide efforts seeking to derail Obama's election over accusations that he either wasn't born a U.S. citizen or that he later renounced his citizenship in Indonesia.

David Weigel at Slate has a rundown on how widespread this has gotten, from the Donofrio case now before the court, to 9/11 troofer Philip Berg's lawsuit, to WorldNetDaily's ongoing fundraiser, to the peculiar case of one Bob Schulz:

That's the same argument made by Bob Schultz, the founder of the paleoconservative We the People Foundation for Constitutional Education. On Monday and Wednesday, Schultz gave the Obama conspiracy its biggest burst of attention—at least since Rush Limbaugh speculated that this was the real reason Obama visited his dying grandmother—by purchasing full-page ads in the Chicago Tribune. In the "open letters" to Obama, Schultz asserts that Obama's certificate of live birth is "forged," that his "grandmother is record[ed] on tape saying she attended your birth in Kenya," and that Obama would have lost his citizenship anyway when Ann Dunham married her second, Indonesian husband, Lolo Soetoro. (Lou Dobbs would be delighted to discover that the 14th Amendment can be nullified so easily.)

Schultz has asked Obama to allow forensic investigators to inspect Obama's files in Hawaii's Department of State. "Have one guy go in and do his thing," explains Schultz. "Have another guy go in, do his thing, put the certificate back in the envelope. These are scientists. They should all come to the same conclusion."

Stephen Piggott observes that the Schulz campaign is being touted heavily by the white-nationalist crowd. That's unsurprising: Schulz has been selling far-right tax theories to gullible suckers for awhile now, and as Ward observes, this is a crowd that has been a major seedbed for far-right organizing for a considerable time.

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It must really suck to be a conservative blowhard these days. Especially when stuck defending Sarah Palin's inanities, such as her cheerily informing us that as vice president she'd be "in charge of the Senate." Obviously, Buchanan was having very little fun yesterday on Hardball.

And when you have someone like Mark Green reminding the public that Palin has her own extremist pandering -- to the Alaskan Independence Party -- lurking in her background, well, I can imagine most of the right-wing talking heads with any brains capable of exploding just wind up looking for a nice corner they can go hide in.

[H/t to Heather for the video.]