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The Fox freakout over the White House's new rapid-response media team headed by Jesse Lee picked up a head of steam last night on Sean Hannity's show, when Andrew Breitbart came on and sounded like his nemesis, Glenn Beck, for a bit, as he debated the token liberal, Democratis strategist Steve Murphy. All that was missing was the chalkboard:

BREITBART: Jesse Lee was at the forefront of the antiwar blogging movement, a point in time in which the same media that is out there saying that you can't criticize the president, Barack Obama, were out there saying 'dissent is patriotic' and so Jesse was protected by the media. Now he wants to go after Fox News, AM talk radio, Andrew Breitbart, and what he's doing is adding an extra protective layer to George Soros -- all the media that he's buying, and now Media Matters, which is a --

MURPHY: This is the Hannity show, not Beck.

BREITBART: This is a $15 million a year operation to try and shut up dissent. This is exactly what they do in totalitarian leftist nations like Venezuela. They try to shut people up.

At this point, Murphy thankfully jumped in and pointed out that Breitbart was being absurd -- this was a standard political media operation, only with more sophisticated media technology to work with. But Breitbart was intent mainly on smearing Jesse Lee:

BREITBART: He's a hit artist.

MURPHY: So are you!

Bretibart didn't really have much of a response to that one. He knew it was true.

It's not just the racist outbursts and the intense adoption of bizarre conspiracy theories about the president's birth certificate that pretty clearly identifies the Tea Partiers as truly a bunch of loons. Then there are the costumes.

We got a prime example earlier this week in D.C., when a group of "Tea Party" spokesmen got up in front of reporters dressed in Revolutionary War costumes and intoned a raft of nutty stuff about fomenting a new American revolution.

What they were really on about was their contempt for House Speaker John Boehner as a "Republican In Name Only" who was selling them out on their key monetary issues. The press conference was indeed about attacking Republicans in the House and warning them they face defeat in the 2012 primaries if they fail to live up to their demands. And the key demand this week is that Republicans refuse to raise the limit on the national debt.

The presser seemed to have been organized by WorldNetDaily's Joseph Farah, who spoke second. But it was led off by a Georgia preacher named William Temple, dressed up as a signer of the Declaration of Independence. He explained:

TEMPLE: We do this colonial outfit to remind the current government of the first revolution. And we are in a revolution, the American people, right now.

Temple went on to claim, among other things, that he had led "1.9 million people" in the September 12 "March on Washington" last year that he claimed propelled Republicans to power. Um, right. In the real world, you see, he was one of about 90,000 people who mostly came to hear Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin.

Of course, part of these people's delusion is that they believe they are far more powerful than they really are. So there they were, demanding that Republicans step up and toe their line on raising the debt ceiling -- even, of course, if it means the United States is forced to default on its full faith and credit.

Later, another colonial impersonator -- this time doing George Washington -- stepped up to the podium and made more vague threats against wayward Republicans:

And the funny thing is, Republicans really believe this stuff. They are completely cowed by the Tea Partiers. That's who owns them now.

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Gee, it sounds like a match made in Tea Party Heaven: Sarah Palin and Jerry Boykin, appearing on the same stage to deliver a good ol' fashioned right-wing fundamentalist "Tribute to the Troops":

Former Alaska governor and vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin will be the keynote speaker for Tribute to the Troops, a military and veterans appreciation rally at Colorado Christian University on May 2, 2011.

Boykin will speak on "Our Debt of Gratitude". Not sure what that means -- but since it's coming from the guy who brought you both Abu Ghraib and Waco, it could be anything.

As Kyle at RightWingWatch observes:

Since leaving the military, Boykin has joined up with self-proclaimed prophet Rick Joyner and become the Religious Right's resident "expert" on all things Islam and a leading member of the Religious Right's Spartan-like army. He is also the man who exposed the fact that President Obama is a Marxist who intends to use the health care reform legislation to build an army of Brownshirts loyal only to him ...

Indeed, it was while elucidating on this charge that it became clear that Boykin is a direct military descendant of Gen. Jack D. Ripper himself:

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And of course, his "expertise" at all things Islam meant that he was the go-to guy when Glenn Beck was expounding on the looming "Caliphate" in the Middle East.

More recently, he's been declaring "Molon Labe" to the dirty America-hating secret-Muslim libruls who he's convinced are coming to take his "rights" away.

Combined with Palin's presence ... well, let's just hope that the critical mass of wingnuttery coming together in one place like that doesn't open a hole in the space-time continuum.

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Memo to President Obama: You may have thought you finally shut the Birthers up yesterday. But you will never shut them up.

These are people who are deeply invested, emotionally and otherwise, in believing that you are not a legitimate president. It's the only way they can cope with the concept of you holding the office of the presidency in the first place. All you really did yesterday was give them a nice shiny new toy to play with.

The proof was on Fox Business News last night, where Eric Bolling hosted a panel led by wingnut extraordinaire Pam Geller, one of the most reptilian creatures of the entire wingnutosphere.

The entire show was a discussion of Bolling's evident belief that what the president presented yesterday was a forgery:

BOLLING: Pamela, were any of these notation on here - I don't know if our camera can get it in too close --- you can see some of these numbers that are clearly written in handwriting on the side. We don't know what they are. Trying to figure out a zero, a two there, an X up over here, a one up here. Were they on the short form?

GELLER: Look, this is a certification of live birth. When I left the hospital, I left with a birth certificate. I'm sorry, I didn't bring with it me, but it looked very much like Donald Trump's. It's a little piece of paper, you've got the nurse -- you know what I'm talking about? Certificate - you know, birth certificate. This is a certification of a live birth. This is actually not a birth certificate.

BOLLING: I need to know this. You see this fold. This has clearly been photocopied from a book. You see that? It kind of folds back to, like, almost like a binding of a book. And then for some reason, there's a green border around it that had to be Photoshopped in. Trying to figure out why they would do that.

GELLER: Well, this whole border is suspect. I mean, if you're taking a scan of something, it would, to your point, it would be white. Why is this the color of the same --

BOLLING: Note this - note this, you guys, April 25, 2011 -- two days ago -- is when this was requested from the state registrar, Alvin Onaka. So we'll keep our eye on it. We'll keep digging. Hey, listen. It may or may not be, but certainly opens up the can of worms that there are at least questions for it.

The absurdity didn't end there. Perhaps the height of absurdity came when, as Ben Dimiero at Media Matters points out, Bolling suggested that the doctor who delivered Obama should have traveled forward in time in order to know that he had delivered the president:

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Digby, commenting on Rick Perlstein's marvelous piece in Mother Jones on the rise of our current "mendocracy" and the legitimation of lying by the modern media, added this:

This history provides an important foundation for my ongoing quest to understand the right's ability to operate without the constraints of hypocrisy or consistency in an environment of epistemic relativism so extreme that we end up believing that wrong is right. It's literally mind-boggling.

There are a couple of mechanisms by which this is occurring. An example of the first kind was this truly mind-boggling exchange between Monica Crowley and Stuart Varney the other day on Fox News, wherein Crowley leapt upon the recent releases of intelligence from Guantanamo via WikiLeaks to declare that they established once and for all that, by golly, torture really did work!

VARNEY: I want your judgment. Do you think President Obama would order it done?

CROWLEY: I think if there were an imminent threat, the commander in chief, regardless of who it was, would order it done, yes.

VARNEY: And you think it should be done.

CROWLEY: I absolutely think it should be done. Listen, the commander-in-chief has one job, and that's to protect American lives. You need to do what's necessary when faced with an imminent threat to do it.

Nevermind that Crowley's evidence that torture works is dubious at best. But it's breathtaking how quickly Crowley and Varney leap over the question: If torture works, should you do it?

What seems not to cross either Crowley's or Varney's minds is the notion that the president might have a higher calling to the nation than simply keeping Americans alive -- that preserving the Constitution and, concomitantly, both our long-term security and our standing in the world as a moral beacon, might be such a higher purpose. The president has an obligation not to make America into a nation of torturers, too. (Of course, it's worth observing that the previous president -- an object of ardent admiration by both these pundits -- not only had a disastrous record on this latter obligation, he was also an abject failure in terms of preserving American lives, too.)

This really is a simple and clear moral issue: Does America torture or not? It is not just a cliche but a great truth that "the torturer is the enemy of all mankind". Which side are we on?

But in the inverted moral world of conservatives, that is not even an issue. All that is at stake for them is criticizing any liberal politician or policy and ardently defending any conservative or Republican. That's their moral compass.

This same imperative is what drives the second mechanism by which the Right's world is turned inside out. And that is a simple and uncomplicated refusal to accepts facts as realities and to embrace lies in their place -- if those lies burnish the emotional narratives upon which the Right ultimately relies for its appeal.

This is manifest particularly in the case of the Birthers, who are singularly immune to fact, logic, reason, or rationality, and ultimately reality. Instead, they've built their little bubble world and nothing, NOTHING will draw them out.

Here's Michelangelo Signorile dealing with a Birther on his radio show the other day, which provides a classic example of this:

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This is why President Obama's release this morning of his long-form birth certificate will not be the air-clearing catharsis he hopes it will be -- it's just the beginning of the next phase in the Birthers' conspiracism.

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You may remember how Russell Pearce, the Arizona Republican state Senate leader and architect of SB1070, went on Bill O'Reilly's show a couple of months ago and pushed hard for a recall campaign against Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik for daring to opine that extremist right-wing rhetoric played a role in the Gabrielle Giffords shooting. (An effort which, last we checked, was going nowhere fast.)

Well, karmic payback can be a rhymes-with-witch:

What may seem to some as an uphill battle is becoming close to a reality for a non-partisan political group as they gather signatures to recall Senate President Russell Pearce.

"I have no doubt we'll get enough signatures to force the recall campaign," said Chad Snow, chairman of Citizens for a Better Arizona.

The group has two thirds of the signatures needed to force a recall election on the senator they accuse of having an extreme agenda.

Now, there are lots of reasons to recall Russell Pearce along these lines (or better yet, never elect him in the first damned place).

There's the recent spate of Tentherism in which he seemingly urged people to declare themselves sovereign citizens.

Or the long-established record of playing footsie with the local neo-Nazis.

Or, if you like, he might be recalled for the corruption that's surfaced in Pearce's dealings and his intimate involvement in that monumentally embarrassing Fiesta Bowl scandal.

No, but what really has people torqued at Pearce is what you might expect from ultimately pragmatic voters: He has fiddled incessantly with his pet immigration fetish while Arizona has burned to a crisp economically. No wonder he's in trouble.

"We feel that Russell Pearce has completely thrown Arizona's economy under the bus so he could pursue one issue," said Snow.

That issue is immigration. Pearce sponsored the controversial SB1070 and even though the law has gained negative national attention, polls show an overwhelming amount of Arizonans support it.

But Snow told us Pearce has neglected what Arizonans really care about.

"He's done nothing for education, jobs or the economy. Instead he focuses on only immigration and gun control."

Then there have been stunts he's been involved in that have exposed the seamy underbelly of Pearce's fetish, like the racist letter read on the floor of the Senate (at Pearce's behest):

Citizens for a Better Arizona needs to collect over 7,700 signatures by May 31st to force a recall election, but Snow is confident they will get more, claiming the Senate President's actions are helping their efforts.

"He's had racist letters read on the Senate floor, he's been reported to have accepted thousands of dollars of gifts from the Fiesta Bowl that he didn't report as required by law. He feels he's above the law and doesn't represent the best interest of Arizona and he's unfit for public office," said Snow.

Oh, and let's not forget the Arizona Senate's latest achievement: A Birther bill that accepts the features of a presidential candidate's penis as evidence of his citizenship. The citizens of Mesa must be so proud.

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I'm not sure exactly what Roger Ailes and his fellow poobahs at Fox News were thinking when they hired Glenn Beck to join them in January 2009, but it is a telling fact that Beck's primary professional background was as a morning zoo-show host -- someone who specializes in goofy stunts and wild-over-the-top envelope pushing. Because that, of course, is exactly what they got for the next couple of years, before they finally decided to cut their losses.

Now, there are plenty of things to object to about Glenn's trainwreck of a career at Fox, particularly the noxious and yet little-noticed way he almost effortlessly mainstreamed extremist ideas and rhetoric, most recently with his full-bore descent into promoting John Birch Society conspiracism. Undoubtedly, Beck's relentless fearmongering and the vicious eliminationism of his rhetoric were important components of what made Beck so toxic. Media Matters has compiled an impressive list of the "50 Worst Things Glenn Beck Said On Fox News" that gives a pretty good rundown -- but is really only a start.

Ultimately, the worst damage he caused was to the shape of our national discourse -- from all these factors, but especially in the way he wrapped it up in a "zany" morning-zoo-show format, dragging that discourse down to the level of a prearranged pro-wrestling match. As Will Bunch puts it:

Because the truth is that Beck's ouster isn't really the end of the nightmare, but just the beginning of the end. Over the last 27 months, Beck -- and let's be clear that he had a lot of help from the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin and Sean Hannity and Rand Paul and all the folks in the Tea Party Movement -- managed to do incalculable harm to the American body politic, that Beck was exactly like Tom and Daisy Buchanan in "The Great Gatsby" who "smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness.."

You'll probably hear a lot about how Beck coarsened the political debate and how his words may have incited violence, but I think the wreckage is a lot more substantive, to actual policies that affect Americans every day. You see, there was a reason that Beck was so fond of a political theory called the Overton Window-- so enamored, in fact, that he made it the title of his (officially) fictional "thriller" novel last summer. The Overton Window is a notion that you can radically move the parameters of political debate by pushing talk to the outer limits, so that ideas that were once deemed extreme suddenly appeared to be normal.

Ironically, no one mastered the use of the Overton Window better than Beck. With all the focus on the leading edge of Beck's craziness -- the "caliphate" stuff, the flirtation with "the FEMA camps," or President Obama's "deep-seated hatred" of white people -- it's easy to foget how he rationalized once out-there ideas to millions of American conservatives, and how those ideas became ingrained in the Republican agenda that has thwarted progressivism from virtually the day Obama took office.

... You could go on and on -- the talk-radio jihad against big government that has put gutless Democrats so on the defensive that they no longer fight to protect vital programs but only over whether to agree to "steep" spending cuts or "draconian" ones, or the fear-mongering on terrorism and Gitmo that made quivering members of Congress afraid to house terror suspects in our supermax prisons. Don't think that Beck's nightly burst of insanity didn't have a lot to do with these things, because they did.

Don't believe me? Then ask a fellow in South Carolina named Bob Inglis who was a Republican congressman until he told his constituents to "turn off Glenn Beck," and lost a primary to an upstart who got 71 percent of the vote. Why do you think the Republicans in Washington remain in lock step, even as 90 percent of what they stay in lock step for is bat-guano crazy?

As Amato said, Beck inflicted the damage that conservatives needed him to inflict. Now the rest of us get to pay for the long, slow, and perhaps impossible job of repairing it.

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Finally, Glenn Beck really will get to feel a little like Martin Luther King -- because he is free, free at last, God almighty, free at last.

Unfortunately, our long national nightmare ... is probably just switching to a new phase.

He explained to his audience yesterday on Fox that he was leaving his regular show there because, gosh, he had to have his arm twisted in the first place just do it:

BECK: When Fox was generous enough to offer me the time at 5 o'clock, I originally didn't take them up on it. I turned them down. One of the reasons was I didn't want to -- I just -- didn't wanna do this. I hated doing it at the other place. This place is sweet! -- in comparison. But I also knew -- believe it or not, anybody who knows me in my real life as everybody -- wee little Erin will tell you too -- I avoid confrontation like nobody's business. Unless I am forced. But it also -- I don't like it.

But -- sometimes you have to stand. I took the job two years ago because I thought I had something important to share. I really thought if I could prove my case -- that something wicked this way was coming -- something in America was wrong, America would listen. And they have.

What noble guy. Brings a tear to your eye and puts a swell in your heart, doesn't it?

Beck's removal from the Fox daily lineup really is, as David Brock puts it, "A victory for civil discourse". (Media Matters, by the way, has put together a list of the 50 Worst Things Glenn Beck Has Said.)

And it was overdue. As George Zornick at ThinkProgress explains:

Beck entered the year without one-third of his earlier audience. Only months into his show, advertisers began deserting his program, and pressure by liberal groups resulted in a loss of nearly 300 advertisers during the course of his show.

Last month, Fox News officials told the New York Times anonymously that they were “contemplating life without Mr. Beck.” The Times also reported that “[m]any on the news side of Fox have wondered whether his chronic outrageousness — he suggested that the president has ‘a deep-seated hatred for white people’— have made it difficult for Fox to hang onto its credibility as a news network.”

That seems like a reasonable concern.

Beck, meanwhile, is actually in a bizarre defensive-gloating position, telling his radio audience this morning:

BECK: Let me just tell you something. Liberal left -- let me make a prediction. ... One year from now, you on the left will be crapping yourselves so much -- you haven't, you haven't crapped in your pants as much as you will in a year from now, as you did since you were a child. Maybe more. You'll be making -- you'll crap yourself more than when you were a baby! And you will find Jesus. You will suddenly find religion and you will be kneeling at some altar lighting candles every day praying to Jesus that Glenn Beck would please just do 5 o'clock on the Fox News Channel.There's my prediction.

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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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Glenn Beck, we can all see, is really plunging wildly over an emotional cliff in his increasingly bizarre attempts to defend his wild conspiracy theories about the unrest in Egypt. And it's been such an epic meltdown that it's been hard to keep track of all its many variations.

But the researchers at Media Matters happened to catch one of the more hilarious of these: Beck bringing on a onetime commanding general in Iraq -- Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin -- to defend his theory as being on the money. That's right: the guy who brought you Abu Ghraib, on to warn of yet another dire threat.

Of course, the last we happened to notice Boykin poking his head out of his lead-lined nuclear bunker was when he was explaining how Marxism is being insidiously implemented in America under President Obama -- rather like another general we once knew:

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