It was only a matter of time before the right wing would turn the current crisis on the Korean peninsula into a parody. It’s not entirely surprising that chief conspiracy theorist Frank Gaffney kicked things off on Thursday with an interesting theory about he thinks the real threat from North Korea is.

Gaffney told Laura Ingraham radio show fill-in host Raymond Arroyo that we should really be worried about the North Koreans putting one of their nukes on a ship to the West Coast, attaching it on a short-range missile and — don’t aim it at any particular large American city where it would inflict the most damage — but fire it up above the atmosphere creating the dreaded “Electro Magnetic Pulse” that will (supposedly) put the entire United States out of business for good:

GAFFNEY: They certainly have an abundance of shorter range missiles which could be brought close to our shores aboard ships. A capability that their Iranian partners, we know, have demonstrated. And by lobbing a relatively small, relatively unsophisticated nuclear weapon of the kind that they seem to have tested now three times on one of these short range missiles high over the United States and detonating it outside of our atmosphere, the North Koreans know they could inflict incalculable harm on this country, even perhaps with just one of these weapons.

And how would that work? Such a weapon detonated in space would trigger something called “Electro Magnetic Pulse,” a very powerful form of electromagnetic energy that would essentially damage or destroy every piece of electronic gear and particularly sensitive equipment like transformers that are the backbone of our electrical power grid. And if those go down, we cease to exist as a 21st Century society because without electrical power, look at Katrina as an example or what happened with Sandy more recently, except the power doesn’t come back on after a couple of days or a couple of weeks. It stays off and that means, really, returning us to kind of a pre-industrial society.

Listen to the clip here:

So the North Koreas will ship a nuke and a missile all the way to the United States — undetected — attach the nuke to the missile (a process they have yet to master) and launch it way up in the atmosphere while U.S. defense officials (particularly the Missile Defense Agency) are none the wiser. If that sounds like something out of a doomsday fiction novel (or a video game), you’re right.

As CAP’s Matt Duss once noted referring to Gaffney’s claim that Iran would pull off such a stunt, “it’s probably worth pointing out here that the likelihood of Iran, or anyone, actually pulling off such an attack is roughly the same as Iran building an enormous, space-bound vacuum cleaner and sucking up all of America’s oxygen.”

Gaffney — who is is director of the far-right Center for Security Policy and whose writing regularly appears in somewhat mainstream publications — is also one of the country’s most prominent Islamophobes and was the brainchild behind Rep. Michele Bachmann’s (R-MN) conspiracy theory she famously peddled last year that certain elements of the U.S. government were under the control of the Muslim Brotherhood (Bachmann got to keep her seat on the House Intelligence Committee after the widely-panned and criticized affair).

But what is the real threat from North Korea? ThinkProgress has a run-down here.

Frank Gaffney and his lawyer sidekick Andrew McCarthy hosted a National Press Club event today to defend Rep. Michele Bachmann’s (R-MN) anti-Muslim witch hunt alleging a supposed Muslim Brotherhood infiltration of the U.S. government. It appears Bachmann and her GOP colleagues got wind of these completely unsubstantiated claims from Gaffney and McCarthy, who both feature prominently in Fear, Inc., CAP’s report on Islamophobia in America.

The duo didn’t offer any new evidence on this supposed Muslim Brotherhood plot, but McCarthy awkwardly got caught denouncing his partner Gaffney’s claims — with Gaffney standing right next to him — that Obama “may still be a Muslim” as “nutty”:

NICK SEMENTELLI, FAITH IN PUBLIC LIFE: Mr. Gaffney doesn’t believe that Obama was born in the United States also he says there’s mounting evidence that he may still be a Muslim, do you agree with those claims? [...]

MCCARTHY: [I]f somebody wants to run a nutty theory that Obama is a Muslim because at one time he may have been in his childhood was raised as one, which I don’t know to be true either, then you know, good for them but I think it’s a stupid thing to do.

Sementelli pressed to McCarthy to address Gaffney’s birtherism but he wouldn’t bite. “I’m not going to do the birth certificate. I’m here to talk about the Muslim Brotherhood,” McCarthy said. Watch the clip:

Aside from wondering whether Obama is “still” a Muslim, Gaffney does regularly flirt with birtherism. “An issue that isn’t being given the attention that it needs to be by the mainstream media,” Gaffney said just as recently as last June, “namely the thorny question of whether Barack Obama is indeed eligible to be president of the United States.”

Full transcript:

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While various right-wing luminaries — including Mitt Romney adviser John Bolton — are defending Rep. Michele Bachmann’s (R-MN) campaign to root out an alleged Muslim Brotherhood infiltration of the U.S. government, many of her Republican colleagues have criticized her campaign. The Huffington Post reports today that many of Bachmann’s fellow members of the House Intelligence Committee are speaking out as well:

“We have a small committee, we work hard together, it’s a very bipartisan committee and we deal with national threats,” said Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.), the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee. This does not help our committee at all.” [...]

“Given our access to sensitive information, I also believe members of the Intelligence Committee have a special responsibility to exercise caution in making statements about national security concerns,” said Rep. Jim Langevin (D-R.I.), a member of the committee. “The only reasonable action for the authors of these letters to take would be to withdraw their requests.”

“The unfounded allegations made by some members of the Intelligence Committee against Huma Abedin are deeply disturbing — and damaging to the committee’s work and its reputation. The authors discredit themselves and are deserving of no further comment,” added Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.).

House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Rogers (R-MI) initially supported Bachmann’s Muslim Brotherhood witch hunt, calling it “very important,” but he has since backtracked. Referring to Bachmann’s suggestion that Huma Abedin, a top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is working on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood, Rogers said, “That kind of assertion certainly doesn’t comport with the Intelligence Committee.”

Today on Center for Security Policy president Frank Gaffney’s radio show, Mitt Romney foreign policy adviser John Bolton defended Rep. Michele Bachmann’s (R-MN) call for the U.S. government to investigate suggestions that government employees — including a top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — are affiliated with a Muslim Brotherhood plot to infiltrate the U.S. government.

Bolton has direct ties to the Romney campaign, serving as an unpaid adviser that regularly appears at campaign events stumping for the presumptive GOP presidential nominee. “John Bolton insists on good results for America and is someone I respect,” Romney said in December. “I think he’s a fine man with great capacity.”

On Gaffney’s radio show today (Gaffney is the brains behind Bachmann’s campaign), Bolton said Bachmann and some of her fellow Republicans are just asking questions, adding that he’s “mystified” by the criticism Bachmann has received:

BOLTON: What I think these members of Congress have done is simply raise the question, to a variety of inspectors general in key agencies, are your departments following their own security clearance guidelines, are they adhering to the standards that presumably everybody who seeks a security clearance should have to go through, are they making special exemptions? What is wrong with raising the question? Why is even asking whether we are living up to our standards a legitimate area of congressional oversight, why has that generated this criticism? I’m just mystified by it.

Listen to the clip, courtesy of Right Wing Watch:

Bolton joins right-wing luminaries Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh in defending Bachmann’s anti-Muslim witch hunt but many top Republicans — Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) — have criticized the Minnesota Congresswoman’s crusade.

Before facing heat this week for her paranoid quest to root out Muslim Brotherhood influence on the U.S. government, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) got support from the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Mike Rogers. But today, Rogers distanced himself from Bachmann’s allegations about Muslim-Americans.

In an interview with the USA Today, Rogers responded to a wave of criticism about Bachmann’s allegations about Huma Abedin, a top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Rogers said:

That kind of assertion certainly doesn’t comport with the Intelligence Committee, and I can say that on the record. I have no information in my committee that would indicate that Huma is anything other than an American patriot.

This was not an activity that was sanctioned as any intelligence committee matter.

Rogers was singing a different tune earlier this month when he appeared on a radio show hosted by Islamophobe Frank Gaffney, a sometime Bachmann advisor and source of her attacks. Gaffney asked him about the Brotherhood’s “influence operation” within the government, particularly about the cleansing of Islamophobic F.B.I. training materials. Rogers said:

Well we are revisiting some of those decisions and a member of my committee Michele Bachmann is kind of taking the lead on this particular issue and going through and trying to figure out what they took out of the training materials and what they left in and why did it get changed? And why the agressive language change and how we teach about the Islam religion and radicalism in Islam.

All of that stuff is very, very important to go through and determine if they have been politicized or not.

Bachmann and Gaffney, for their parts, have stuck to their charges. Bachmann took more bipartisan heat this weekend for doubling down and accusing Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) — who has led the charge to demand evidence of Bachmann’s allegations — of being “associated with… the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Senator John McCain deserves congratulations for his remarks on the Senate floor yesterday defending Huma Abedin — top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — against charges that she is part of a “Muslim brotherhood conspiracy,” as claimed by Congresswoman Michele Bachmann.

But even as McCain condemned the attacks on Abedin, he defended the think tank — the Center for Security Policy — whose tinfoil-hatted research forms the basis of those attacks, and CSP’s president, Frank Gaffney, whom McCain described as “a longtime friend.” As Adam Serwer noted yesterday, “It’s Gaffney’s scurrilous reasoning masquerading as policy expertise that lead to Bachmann’s smearing of Abedin in the first place.”

This sort of thing, mongering crazy, American-way-of-life threatening conspiracies, is what Gaffney does. There’s always a Boogeyman out there.

Back in 2002, Gaffney was concerned about the influence of “the Wahhabi Lobby” — “a far-flung network of organizations associated with the agenda of the radical Wahhabist sect of Islam and largely financed, directly or indirectly, by the Saudi Arabian government and its proxies” — which he claimed was financing the campaigns of a number of U.S. politicians.

In 2009, Gaffney’s CSP issued a report asserting the existence of an “Iran Lobby” in Washington:

A complex network of individuals and organizations with ties to the clerical regime in Tehran is pressing forward in seeming synchrony to influence the new U.S. administration’s policy towards the Islamic Republic of Iran. Spearheaded by a de facto partnership between the National Iranian-American Council (NIAC), the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and other organizations serving as mouthpieces for the mullahs’ party line, the network includes well-known American diplomats, congressional representatives, figures from academia and the think tank world.

Among those the CSP report named as “hav[ing] been associated in one way or another” with this supposed Iran Lobby were Ambassador Dennis Ross; Susan Rice, the Obama administration’s new Ambassador to the U.N.; Fletcher School professor and Middle East scholar, Vali Nasr; and Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass. The Center for A New American Security (CNAS) was also named as an Iran Lobby affiliate for having promoted diplomacy with Iran, which the report simply interprets as “appeasement”.

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Egyptian protesters threw shoes and tomatoes at Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s motorcade in Alexandria this week. The New York Times reported that their demonstration “delighted conservative bloggers in the United States” but “what has attracted less attention” is why they were protesting: a conspiracy theory cooked up by Islamophobes in the U.S. that the Obama administration is working on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood:

Pressed by American reporters to explain where they got the idea that their new Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi, had been foisted on them through a U.S. plot, rather than the will of the majority, several Egyptians cited information gathered from American blogs or news sites.

An Egyptian-American Christian who met Mrs. Clinton on Sunday cited a recent assertion by Representative Michele Bachmann, a Republican, “that the Obama Administration is pursuing a closeted pro-Muslim agenda,” in a conversation with Time magazine’s correspondent, Abigail Hauslohner.

Rumors that the Obama administration has provided the Muslim Brotherhood with billions of dollars in aid remain an article of faith with many Egyptians who are convinced that Mr. Morsi’s victory was a sham, despite repeated efforts by the U.S. Embassy in Cairo to correct the record on Twitter.

That’s right — Bachmann’s ludicrous allegation that the Muslim Brotherhood has “penetrated” the United States government convinced anti-Islamist Egyptians that the U.S. is backing their domestic Islamist opponents. The source for Bachmann’s ravings is Frank Gaffney, a conspiracy theorist who claims that the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated the government and that shari’a law is coming to the U.S.

Non-coincidentally, one Egyptian blogger, Sara Ahmed, said that retired Lieutenant General William Boykin had evidence that the U.S. was in cahoots with the Muslim Brotherhood, pointing to an episode of Gaffney’s radio show in which he hosted Boykin. The retired military officer has claimed that there ought be “no mosques in America” and that Muslims are “under an obligation to destroy our Constitution.” Underscoring why such rhetoric is so dangerous, Ahmed said that a senior official of Boykin’s level “wouldn’t say such thing without proof!”

The Obama Administration is quite wary of the consequences of the Brotherhood’s electoral victory for regional stability and has been prodding the Brothers to respect the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty. Meanwhile, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) has publicly called on Bachmann to produce solid and irrefutable evidence that the Muslim Brotherhood has penetrated the U.S. government.

Ratifying the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST) seems like a no-brainer. The treaty’s central provisions divvy up maritime territory among countries for the purposes of natural resource development. More than 160 countries have acceded to it, including the whole of the developed world. Iran, Syria, and North Korea oppose it while the Obama administration, five former Republican Secretaries of State, the U.S. military, and major affected industries all support ratification.

But today, according to a blog post by Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), enough Senate Republicans have signed on to block the Treaty so that it will not pass in the coming year: “4 additional senators have joined in opposition to LOST, including Mike Johanns (R-NE), Kelly Ayotte (R-NH), Rob Portman (R-OH) and Johnny Isakson (R-GA). With 34 senators against the misguided treaty, LOST will not be ratified by the Senate this year.” DeMint’s complaints against the treaty, listed in the same post, aren’t remotely based in reality:

• Demint claims LOST would sneak in a cap and trade law for greenhouse gasses. In reality, a State Department legal analysis found that “it contains no obligation to implement any particular climate change policies.”
• DeMint claims the U.S. would have to pay “trillions in royalties” to state sponsors of terrorism. But according to John Norton Moore, a U.S. ambassador for the Law of the Sea in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations, “the treaty grants the U.S. the only permanent veto as to how the modest royalties, collected in return for secure property rights, are to be distributed to state parties” and would allow “U.S. access to strategic minerals of copper, nickel, cobalt, manganese and rare earths worth about $1 trillion.“
• DeMint claims it would strengthen China against the United States. Actually, it would give the U.S. a leg up on Beijing in several major areas.

So why are 34 Republicans opposing it? Because, as Dave Weigel reported for Foreign Policy, conspiracy theories about the U.N. have “moved from the fringes of the GOP into its mainstream.” Republicans, Weigel discovered, have been swayed by a fringe theory that claims LOST is facilitating the U.N.’s takeover of American sovereignty:

“[I've] heard we should not join this convention because, quote, ‘It’s a U.N. treaty,’” said [Secretary] Clinton, “and of course that means the black helicopters are on their way.” Opposition to the treaty, she said, is “unfortunate because it’s opposition based in ideology and mythology, not in facts.”

Republicans were unconvinced. “Most wars we’ve fought have been fought over ideology and philosophy,” said Idaho’s Sen. Jim Risch, who’s been winning elections in his state since 1970. “If we give up one scintilla of sovereignty that this country has fought, has bled for, and have given up our treasure and the best that America has, I can’t vote for it.”

Of course, when military leaders pointed out that the treaty would actually strengthen America’s position in the world, Risch yelled at them. The most influential advocate for the “sovereignty” concern that Risch was peddling, according to Weigel, is Frank Gaffney, a well-documented source of Islamophobic conspiracy theories.

When Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) recently escalated her paranoid quest to root out the Muslim Brotherhood from the U.S. government, she named names. There’s a problem, however, when conspiracy theorists get into specifics, people will start demanding facts to back up their wild-eyed assertions.

That’s exactly what her colleague form the Minnesota Congressional delegation Rep. Keith Ellison (D) did when he responded to her letter to the State Department insinuating that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s aide Huma Abedin (the wife of former Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner) was at the heart of the Brotherhood’s infiltration of the State Department. “If she has sources for this type of information,” Ellison said in a statement, “she owes it to the country to reveal them to the proper authorities, but definitely not this way.”

Now, Ellison has taken his request for specifics directly to Bachmann and the co-signers of her letters to State and other government departments — Reps. Trent Franks (R-AZ), Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Thomas Rooney (R-FL), and Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA) also signed. Ellison also calls out the source of their information, arch-Islamophobe Frank Gaffney. Ellison wrote:

I request that you provide my office a full accounting of the sources you used to make the serious allegations against the individuals and organizations in your letters. If there is not credible, substantial evidence for your allegations, I sincerely hope that you will publically clear their names.

(Read the whole letter here.)

After listing a host of ludicrous allegations made by Gaffney, Ellison wrote, “Mr. Gaffney’s views have been widely discredited, including by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and conservative organizations.” Gaffney was repudiated by the American Conservative Union, and barred from the powerhouse’s annual conservative CPAC confab.

Gaffney’s clearly pleased with Bachmann’s witch-hunt, soliciting support from other Members of Congress, like Republican House Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Rogers (MI), on his radio show. That he would serve as a source of information for what Ellison calls “serious allegations” is indeed troubling.

It seems now that Bachmann and her coterie of Republican Congressional conspiracy theorists will either have to put up, or shut up.