Wingnut News for Wednesday.

Fleischer And O’Reilly: Bush Didn’t Call On ‘Dot Coms And Other Oddballs’ Like The Huffington Post
After President Obama’s first prime time press conference last night, Bill O’Reilly asked former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer for his reaction. O’Reilly noted that Obama had a prepared list of reporters from whom he planned to take questions. Fleischer explained that former President Bush used a similar method to avoid taking questions from “dot coms and other oddballs.” In response, O’Reilly suggested that Obama’s “oddball” screening was perhaps not as effective as Bush’s because the President called on the Huffington Post:

O’REILLY: George Bush came in with a list of guys he was going to call on?

FLEISCHER: Yes, I used to prepare it for him. I would give him a grid, show him where every reporter is seated. And there are some reporters, you know, in that briefing room, you can imagine, Bill, you get a lot of dot coms and other oddballs who come in there. They’re screened.

O’REILLY: Like the Huffington Post. Now it gets called on.

FLEISCHER: And I used to seat them all in one section. I would call it “Siberia.” And I told the president, “Don’t call on Siberia.”

Glenn Beck's latest looming apocalypse: Iran
Suggestion for Glenn Beck: Just rename your new Fox News show "The Apocalypse Now! Hour" and spare us the pretense. Because the looming-doom schtick is already getting beyond predictable.

Every night it's a new conspiracy, same as the old conspiracy. (Sometimes Beck promises these stories will "make blood shoot out your eyes." Which makes me mostly want to change the channel.) Last week, for instance, we had several episodes on Mexico's impending collapse. Plus the socialism/communism/fascism thing.

On Monday night, it was Iran. For this, he brought in a fellow believer in the notion that Iran wants to bring about Armageddon, an evangelical author named Joel Rosenberg.

Rosenberg and Beck, in fact, together created some of the most bizarre daytime cable-news TV I've ever seen at CNN's Headline News last year, talking insider-fundie Bible babble about the certain signs Jesus was coming back (see here and here for the prime examples).

This time, the ranting is reserved to a conspiracy theory about that new Iranian satellite and the secret meaning of its name.

But Beck also wants us to delve the Biblical meaning of it all:

If I may -- If you look at the extremist Muslim version of the Mahdi, and then you read the Book of Revelation, he suspiciously looks like the Anti-Christ.

Seeing that he's the one that's running a one-world government and executing everyone that disagrees with him from Babylon -- I don't know where I've heard that one before.

Huckabee: Stimulus is ‘anti-religious’ — Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee warned supporters Tuesday that the $828 billion stimulus package is “anti-religious.” — In an e-mail that was also posted on his blog ahead of the Senate's passage, Huckabee wrote: “The dust is settling …

BillO mocks Helen Thomas, calls her "old lady", "wicked witch of the east"
BillO, the eternal class act, ridicules Helen Thomas by calling her the "wicked witch of the east" and imitating her voice in a very, um, unflattering way.

O'Reilly: The White House press corps looked intimidated to me... Except for that, what's her name? The old lady, Helen Thomas. [squawking sound]
Colmes: Is that your Helen Thomas impression?

O'Reilly: Yea! [squawking sound]

Colmes: I didn't know you did impersonations.

O'Reilly: It's like the wicked witch of the east! If I were Obama, I would've poured water on her, and she would dissolve!

Colmes: It's not nice to make fun of an old woman, Bill.

O'Reilly: It doesn't matter.