RADICAL RIGHT — CONSERVATIVES TOUT CONSPIRACY THEORY THAT OBAMA WANTED OIL SPILL: Yesterday, former Bush-appointed FEMA director Michael Brown — infamous for severely mismanaged the federal response to Hurricane Katrina — accused the Obama administration of playing politics with the oil spill, claiming that the growing catastrophe is “exactly what they want.” Brown said that the President sought to use the disaster to “pander to the environmentalists,” and even suggested that he intentionally delayed the administration’s response in order to allow the spill to worsen. Brown’s charge, which ignores the fact that every branch of government had been engaged in managing or investigating the crisis for at least a week, follows a spate of similar right-wing conspiracy theories about the incident. As the disaster caused by the explosion became more apparent last week, right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh suggested that someone intentionally blew up the rig in order to “head off more oil drilling.” By yesterday morning the meme had found a home on Fox and Friends, where former Bush press secretary Dana Perino said she was “not trying to introduce a conspiracy theory” before asking, “But was this deliberate?” Later in this show, host Steve Doocy asked Fox Business’ Eric Bolling to respond to people who have suggested that “there’s a possibility this could be sabotage.” Citing Perino, Bolling engaged in conspiracy speculation, asking “did they let it leak a little bit and say, ‘boy I don’t know?’ I mean, the conspiracy theorists would say, maybe they let it leak for a while and then they address the issue.” Until Limbaugh and Fox News’ recent speculation, such oil spill truther theories had appeared only on fringe websites. And while federal investigators are not ruling out any possible causes, the President of BP America himself blamed the disaster on “a failed piece of equipment.”

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