Stephen Colbert struggled last night to pin down a conspiracy theory good enough to explain the uprising in Egypt. Was it a digital revolution or, as Glen Beck has warned, the first stages of a looming Islamic caliphate?
Or perhaps most sinister of all, was it caused by the curse of King Tut's stolen manhood?
Colbert rolled a clip from Beck's program last week in which the Fox News host used Egypt as a launching point to argue that the Middle East and then ultimately the world would be brought under a new communist Islamic world order. Though Beck hedged that he couldn't say for sure if or when that would all happen, Colbert said that made the theory even more dangerous.
"The conspiracies that we know are coming but might never happen are the most dangerous," Colbert said, "because if they might never happen, how will we know if we stopped it?"
Not to be outdone by Beck's theory, Colbert then introduced one of his own. Linking the uprising to the legendary curse of King Tut, Colbert speculated that it was really a huge cover up initiated by the same dark forces behind the mystery of the "pharoah's pilfered phallus."
My favorite lines from the clip.
O'Reilly doesn't buy Beck's conspiracy. To him, this situation is understandable, unlike the tides. But, if in fact, if it's not Code Pink and Islamists and Communists, then who is behind this uprising in Egypt?