Warning: excessive adulation of Barack Obama is harmful to the vision and can in extreme cases cause hallucinations.

We're all familiar with how an Obamania overdose produced strange tingling sensations in Chris Matthews.  A new, virulent strain of the affliction has now emerged, claiming its first victim in the person of Bob Herbert, who on live national TV saw visions of the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Washington Monument where none existed.

The NYT columnist, a guest on today's Morning Joe, expanded on the theory set forth in his column of this past Saturday, Running While Black, that the McCain campaign ad mocking Obama as a Paris Hilton/Britney Spears-type celebrity was actually "designed to exploit" racist anxiety about black men and white women. Herbert lumped the McCain ad with the "call me" ad the RNC ran against Harold Ford, Jr. in his Tennessee senate race.

It was in describing the McCain ad that Herbert's symptoms surfaced.

View video here.

What do people on the ultra-left hate more: George W. Bush or Fox News?

The question stems from an incident Friday at the Netroots Nation conference in Austin, Texas, when former Democrat Congressman Harold Ford Jr. was booed for saying that he has great respect for his former colleagues at Fox News.

This was so newsworthy that the Huffington Post's Sam Stein actually wrote about it (emphasis added, video of Ford's comments embedded right):

The "Today" show's lead political story on Monday was that the Obama campaign was offended by the liberal New Yorker magazine's attempt to parody supposed right wing attacks on Obama, on its cover. To analyze the liberal Obama's reaction to the magazine cover, they brought on former liberal Democratic Congressman Harold Ford Jr. to discuss the controversy.

"Today" co-host, Ann Curry, announced Ford was a new NBC News analyst and not surprisingly Ford acted more like an Obama PR flack as he determined: "I've never seen a candidate treated like this, at this point in a campaign."

The following is the full segment as it occurred on the July 14, "Today" show:

Folks that watched Sunday's "Meet the Press" debate between former Rep. Harold Ford Jr. (D-Tennessee) and Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas might have witnessed the final transformation of the Kossack leader from Netroots chief to Democrat Party operative.

In fact, you could almost hear Emperor Palpatine cackling in the background.

Ignoring the actual lack of substance in the discussion, one thing was made impeccably clear: Markos is now fully ensconced in today's Democrat Party, while Ford and his centrist DLC are persona non grata.

By no means does that validate Moulitsas' absurd claims that Kossacks and Netroots members represent the center of American politics as reported here and here. However, the inanities and hypocrisies uttered by Moulitsas Sunday could easily have been stated with a straight face by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada).

For instance, read the following nonsensical assertion made by Markos if you have the stomach for it, and ask yourself how many of the current Democrat leaders and presidential candidates could have said the exact same thing (video available here):

After the press spent last weekend gushing over liberal bloggers with nothing but glowing coverage of the YearlyKos convention in Chicago, the media's fascination with the Netroots continued with reckless abandon this weekend.

On Saturday, the Washington Post published an op-ed by Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas, to be followed by a debate on Sunday's "Meet the Press" between the head Kossack and the chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, Harold Ford, Jr.

Are media recognizing the power of the Netroots, or just trying to assist their efforts to move the Democrat Party further and further to the left?

Regardless of the answer, Moulitsas continued to posit in the Post the same absurd assertion from his keynote address last weekend that he and his ilk represent the center of American politics (emphasis added):