With recent campaign polls showing noticeable movement towards President Obama in recent days, and with some news accounts reporting that Romney aides concede they're losing ground, National Review editor Rich Lowry reached out to a nameless Romney “adviser” for a comment.

The aide insisted the Boston-based campaign “feels good” about the electoral map and its chances of defeating Obama in key swing states in November.

Aside from that expected spin, what was most curious was the aide's attack on the supposedly Democrat-leaning press corps and how it's working in tandem with the Obama campaign. Romney himself has pressed this same campaign conspiracy, which flourishes online among fevered conservative bloggers: Journalists are de facto White House employees. (If so, they're doing an awful job.)

But note this whopper that followed [emphasis added]:

And the more Washington DC controls our economy, the more important inside-the-beltway publications are and the more money they make.  The 202 area code is dominated by people who will make more money if Obama is reelected, so it's not just an ideological thumb they're putting on the scale for him, it's a business interest.

The aides' comments mirror the increasingly aggressive right-wing media's attacks on the press. This assault is driven by the conspiratorial claims that not only do journalists have a liberal bias, and therefore spin the news in that direction, but that reporters go to work each day determined to re-elect Obama. The all-consuming allegations paint the picture of a completely rigged system where the White House and press corps work seamlessly to advance a Democratic agenda.

“This is all about the media OPENLY coordinating with the Obama campaign to win reelection for a failed president,” proclaimed Breitbart.com this summer. It's a declaration that has been repeated on an endless loop ever since, and with increasing frenzy.

Now the latest twist is the claim that the media want Obama to win because the press corps will enrich itself with Obama in the White House because. How? Because Obama wants the government to control the U.S. economy, therefore D.C. media becomes more important.  (Does that even make sense?)

This bizarre pronouncement seems to be a riff on the right-wing media chant from the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and others that Obama's aggressively trying to force Americans to be more dependent on the government via unemployment checks, food stamps, and bailouts.

The wide-eyed allegation is that Obama's a socialist (at best) who wants the government to control more and more of peoples' lives, which includes controlling the economy; that Obama's an anti-capitalist who disdains free enterprise.

For four years, Fox News has been drilling that attack line of Obama pushing “un-American” “socialism.”

Glenn Beck was perhaps the most obsessed with the paranoid notion that Obama was bent on creating a socialist, or even communist, regime in America where the government was all-powerful, and that Obama had “aligned himself” with “radical socialists.”  Beck famously compared Obama and his policies to a Marxist heroin dealer and “the heroin that he is pushing is government.”

Of course, it should be noted that the number of people actually working for the government has fallen since Obama took office, which completely undermines this notion of the White House trying control “our economy.”