Over at Salon.com's The War Room, Gabriel Winant gets to the nub of the incessant joking about President Obama's teleprompters at CPAC yesterday:

But at their core, these ideas about the president and teleprompters are two heads of the same hydra that we've now seen all over the American right-wing: the idea that the president is a Manchurian candidate of some kind. It shows up in the birther arguments of course, and in the idea that ACORN stole the election. It's there in the fear that the president is a secret Muslim, or the co-conspirator of all kinds of radical wackjobs. Even the recent mini-fracas about how Obama put his feet on the Oval Office desk is indicative of this. Refute one paranoid theory about the president, of course, and you just see three more come at you. When one thing Orly Taitz says is proven false, she just jumps to the next idea.

At the core of this is a simple refusal to believe that this president could possibly be legitimate, even when he does exactly the same things that his predecessors did (or that all politicians do). The prevalence of teleprompter jokes at CPAC is one small mark of the penetration into the mainstream of hydra-headed conspiracism about Obama.

No argument here, but it's worth expanding upon this a bit. The teleprompter gags were flying, and my colleague Brian Frederick rightly notes that the “legacy of the Conservative Political Action Conference is shaping up to be little more than a bunch of lame teleprompter jokes.” But not to be overlooked are the many straight-faced assertions made during yesterday's CPAC speeches that explicitly demonstrate the paranoid depths the movement conservatives are mining.

Florida senate candidate Marco Rubio accused Democrats of secretly implementing “statist” policies with the end result of turning America into something resembling the communist-run Cuba his parents escaped:

Now, the problem is that in 2008 leaders with this worldview won elections. And now they know that the American people will never support their vision of America. So, instead, over the last 12 months they have used a severe economic downturn, a severe recession as an excuse to implement the statist policies that they have longed for all this time. In essence, they are using this downturn as cover not to fix America, but to try to change America to fundamentally redefine the role of government in our lives and the role of America in the world.

[...]

Now, I must decide, do I want my children to grow up in the country that I grew up in or do I want them to grow up in a country like the one my parents grew up in?

Washington Post columnist George Will expounded on the administration's designs to “create” a fiscal crisis in order to enlarge the government:

The general problem, my friends, is not what Rahm Emmanuel said, “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” The real problem is what Rahm Emmanuel and others like him think, which is a crisis is a lovely thing to create. The crisis that is being created before our eyes is the crisis of the exploding deficit, which they hope will put us in a position to have to have, with spiraling deficits, a stampede towards the enlargement of the government, perhaps justified by this or that commission. Who knows? That's the object.

And who knows what kind of lunatic conspiracism we'll hear tomorrow from keynote speaker Glenn Beck? He's already on record expressing his belief that President Obama represents the final seconds of a 100-year “time bomb” set by shadowy progressive agents in the early 20th century, the purpose of which was to establish a “socialist utopia.”

It's an interesting dynamic to consider, actually. Conservatives regard the president as too incompetent to get through a simple speech without the aid of a teleprompter, but they also see him as diabolically ingenious enough to secretly enact shadowy conspiracies to undermine the very foundations of the United States.