Far right conspiracy lunacy is now well entrenched even on sites that used to be considered “mainstream conservative” — like townhall.com.

Yesterday at Townhall, conservatives were served up a piping hot slice of deranged conspiracy-mongering from Floyd and Mary Beth Brown: Could the Obama Administration be Blocking Gulf Clean-up Efforts Intentionally?

Any time an article starts off with “this may sound like a conspiracy theory,” it is.

At first blush this sounds like an outlandish question with a conspiratorial twist. The corollary question goes like this: Is the Obama administration intentionally scaling back clean-up efforts in the Gulf in an attempt to maximize the damage so Democrats in Congress will have an excuse to take effective control over yet another major sector of our economy and impose crippling and draconian new taxes on the American people?

We first learned of this controversy reading Sher Zieve who wrote in the Canada Free Press: “Obama is doing the bare minimum so that destruction will be at an all-time maximum — in order to shove his Cap and Trade bill (which will complete our destruction) down our throats.”

In this numbingly stupid article you can track the arc of a developing wingnut fantasy, originating at Canada Free Press (the Canadian equivalent of World Net Daily, but possibly even more bugeyed nuts), then to townhall.com (with 96 commenters as I write, all of them wholeheartedly convinced that the monstrous Obama Thing is deliberately poisoning the Gulf of Mexico like a comic book super-villain), and finally spilling all over the raving wingnut blogosphere.