Under the conspiratorially accusatory headline, “Did CNN Sabotage Rep. Bachmann’s SOTU Response?” Andrew Breitbart posted an item that illustrates what a pathetic excuse for a news analyst he is.

Michele Bachmann’s “official” Tea Party response to President Obama’s State of the Union speech was ridiculed by many because she appeared to be staring off into the distance somewhere over the left shoulder of the viewer. The explanation for this was that there was one camera with the TelePrompTer that was provided by the Tea Party staff, and another that was used for the television networks’ news feed. This resulted in giving Bachmann an even more otherworldly aura than she has normally.

Leave it to the Rightist Panic Squad to assume the existence of a clandestine plot to sabotage Bachmann and the Tea Pods. This is how Breitbart’s web site laid out the evil scheme:

“Our sources tell us that CNN had originally agreed to use the live feed set up by Tea Party Express, which had a teleprompter running on the lens in which Rep. Bachmann was delivering her speech. But, when Rep. Bachmann left the camera set-up and sat in the House chamber to hear Pres. Obama’s speech, CNN set up a camera of their own, just off to the side of the main, tele-prompter/camera. Thus, when CNN provided their network feed it ended up skewed and off-kilter.”

Imagine that. After the congresswoman left the room, CNN scurried to stage a production fiasco that would humiliate her. There is just one little problem with this scenario: The network pool camera was provided by Fox News, not CNN. So either Fox News was the dastardly conspirator, or Breitbart and his “sources” are liars and/or morons.

The folks at Fox happily posted Breitbart’s item on Fox Nation, further disseminating the false conspiracy. And while Breitbart’s site was eventually updated to reflect the fact that it was Fox’s camera, Fox Nation, as of this writing, has still not made the correction.

Even though Fox provided the pool camera, CNN was the only network to air live coverage of Bachmann’s response. Perhaps that is where the real conspiracy lies. CNN’s devious scheme was to actually let the country hear Bachmann. How insidious! And Fox, of course, conspired to protect Bachmann by declining to air her response.

However, we must not forget that CNN abandoned their principles by promoting the corrupt Tea Party Express, and their redundant GOP State of the Union response, in the first place. It is another example of associating themselves with a disreputable political entity, as they are doing with an upcoming GOP debate co-hosted by CNN and Tea Party Express. This relationship was negotiated by CNN’s new president Ken Jautz, who is the man who gave Glenn Beck his first job on television, so I suppose our expectations should not be very high. But it is still sad to see that in their desperation for ratings they have sold their journalistic soul.