There’s wingnut gold in them thar hills! Seriously, Hugh Hewitt’s radio show is a freakin’ gold mine for aficionados of pure wingnuttery. Let’s go prospectin’!

Talking to Fivehead (TM Tbogg Enterprises) about immigration, Hugh makes a candid slip but swiftly recovers his disingenuousness:

HH: But you know why they [flew a Mexican flag above an upside-down American flag]? They were waiving a red flag in front of the Republicans. That’s all it was. It was designed to bring the Minutemen out of their closet with their guns going, proverbially, they don’t have guns. It was designed to send Laura and other talk show hosts into orbit, and it did. It was designed to get exactly this sort of meltdown, but I’ll tell you, I think the meltdown, in the final analysis, because it focuses on security, is going to help Republicans again.

Nice try, Hugh. You had it right the first time.

Chatting with Mark Steyn, Hewitt complains about the Iraq Study Group, which he says is unnecessary, is just another 9-11 Commission. Steyn’s reply is 24 karat wingnuttery!

MS: Well, the 9/11 Commission is the…I mean, you know me. I’m a foreigner, but I’m pro-American. And yet I must say, the 9/11 Commission is everything I loathe about the United States, in that its legalistic, retrospective, showboating blowhards, pompous people going on TV round the clock. And in effect, it becomes something in and of itself. It’s not just commenting on something like a play by play guy is, but it actually changes the course of the something its commenting on. And that’s what’s bad about this. You know, Iraq isn’t a Broadway play in previews. The show has opened, and it’s on now. So it’s too late to have arguments about this little weak spot in the first act, and we should get it re-written. The show has opened, and the responsibility of these people involved in this, James Baker, Lee Hamilton, Rudy Giuliani, all these people, is that they should now be saying let’s win it, and then have the arguments.

The stab in the back argument now applies to the 9-11 Commission and the Iraq Study Group. Thanks, Mr. Wingnutien! But I’m not staking my claim here; it’s on the Canadian side of Hewitt Territory.

Here’s HH getting cosy with VDH (emphasis on VD):

HH: And to refer to the action of the NSA to conduct surveillance of al Qaeda contacting their agents in the United States as criminal behavior, it’s reckless political behavior. It’s over the edge political behavior.

VDH: It is.

HH: The sort that marked the end of the Roman Republic. Now I’m not…

VDH: It is, and it’s ahistorical, Hugh, because…not just the Roman Republic, but this is a country where Abraham Lincoln suspended habeus corpus. Andrew Johnson did it in the entire state of Tennessee. We intured people in World War I and World War II. Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy used things, all things that we regretted later, and we haven’t even approached that, even though in this particular war, unlike those in the past, we’ve lost 20 acres in downtown Manhattan from stealthy attacks, which are more likely to be the exact things we have to watch for, than a conventional, transparent enemy. And we haven’t done any of that, and yet this country has almost become unhinged in a way that our ancestors, getting back to this house, were not unhinged about.

What a choice nugget of wingnuttery. VDH says that Bush hasn’t really gone that far in shredding the constitution — but he could if he wanted! And what are all these libruhls crying about? They haven’t been interned. Yet. Whiners. But HH is also precious there: people complaining about Bush! Why, it’s like the fall of the Rome!

Here’s HH again with Mark Steyn. HH has just told Steyn what he thinks of George Will’s opinion that Iraq, Iran and North Korea are more dangerous today than in 2002: that they aren’t more dangerous, we were just more blind to the danger before. Steyn agrees, then ruminates in a fantastically wingnutty way:

And I think if we left Oil For Food in place, if we’d left Saddam in place, things would be a lot more dangerous in Iraq today. In Iran, this is really a hangover from the 1970’s. You know, Iran…the first attack on American sovereignty was not…on American soil, was not 9/11. It was the Iranian Embassy, and we should have dealt with that problem then. When history comes a-calling, you never have a choice between good or bad options. They’re only between bad and much, much worse options. And the reality of today is that we’re dealing with problems that could have been, would have been easier to settle twenty years ago. If we don’t settle them now, they’ll be much more difficult, if not impossible to settle in ten years time.

Translation: it was all Jimmy Carter’s fault! We should have kept the Shah in power or, failing that, have wiped Tehran from the map when the embassy was stormed. That would have fixed those muslims’ wagon!

Keep diggin, there’s more wingnuttery in there somewhere, I just know it!

Here’s Fivehead Lileks again, predicting for HH the future stances of the disloyal media:

JL: It ends when a Democrat takes the White House, perhaps. Because at that point, there’s a fighting chance, maybe, that large swaths of the media will begin to consider this theirs. Up to now, it hasn’t been their fight. If there had been some Democrat in the office in 2002, 2003, who gave them that old JFK ‘bear any burden’, Berlin airlift vibe, they might have gotten manned up sufficiently to realize that this is actually everybody’s war. But until that point, no. They’re going to see it through a very narrow prism, and that’s going to be exactly what they’ve been showing us. On the front page of my own paper, which I love dearly, the third anniversary of the war was heralded by what? Do you think it was…and I’m not expecting a cake. I’m not expecting some ginned up photo where the little kids from the neighborhood bring a big cake to the soldiers every day. But was it a hospital? Was it a school? Was it a smiling thumbs up or a purple finger? No. The third anniversary was presented through the bombed-out window of a car. That was the image of three years of accomplishment right there.

That’s some shiny, glittery chunk of wingnuttery right there! Take it to the assay office double pronto!