Well, we’ve all suspected it for some time, but now we have it directly from the horse’s mouth: IvyGate founding co-editor Chris Beam is a Republican operative intent on destroying the reputation of America’s Greatest Hope for Survival.

Beam, who is a Columbia grad, has a prominently placed item at Slate today in which he claims responsibility for widely circulating the phrase “terrorist fist jab” as a possible interpretation for the fist-bump shared between Barack and Michelle Obama on the night that Obama clinched the Democratic nomination. Like so many things in our Internet-crazed lives, it seems that the trouble originated in an anonymous comment on a website:

The morning after Obama locked up the nomination, I was writing a “Trailhead” item that mocked the media’s difficulty in figuring out what to call the now famous gesture. “Fist-pound,” “knuckle-bump,” and “fist-to-fist thumbs up” were among the funnier examples, but one of them—”Hezbollah-style fist jab”—was particularly risible. It came from the Web site for Human Events, a hard-right weekly. Unfortunately, I failed to note that its provenance was not the magazine itself but a reader comment posted below an unrelated column by Cal Thomas. I linked the phrase to the column but didn’t explain that the words weren’t Thomas’

A couple miscommunications later and the phrase ended up on Fox News, causing a great deal of hand-wringing about how low the Republicans are willing to go to paint Obama as a the scary “other.”

As usual, the left has proven that the only thing more dangerous than the vast right-wing conspiracy is the vast left-wing ability to fuck itself over unnecessarily. Beam’s confession coincides with day 3 of the mass hysteria provoked by the cover of the latest New Yorker, which depcits Barack in traditional Muslim garb terrorist fist-jabbing a machine-gun toting Michele while an American flag burns in the fireplace. The cover has led to cries of umbrage from Obama’s camp, a great deal of shouting on cable news, and mumblings of “Didn’t New Yorker covers used to be funny?” from sane people.

Meanwhile, real terrorists killed more real people, but I’m not sure how you make that into a cartoon. Oh, right.