Kenyan Muslim socialists in space!

Today's triumph of hard- hitting investi- gative journalism comes on the heels of Tuesday's keefing in California (be sure to watch the video for the full effect). Your top story, from the Fair 'n' Balanced Network:

Is this Logo-gate? (No, but thanks for asking.)

The Internet is abuzz (really?) with comparisons of the "strikingly similar" logos of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency and the ubiquitous Obama 2008 campaign. (I think we mean the logo was ubiquitous, not the campaign. But onward!)

The Missile Defense Agency, which is part of the Defense Department, now features a circular red, white and blue logo on its Web site that has been characterized in some reports as "scarily" similar to President Obama's former campaign symbol. (That's "one" report, not "some" reports, and it appears to be a blog post from the online producer of the WashTimes' editorial pages.) Others have noted that it has a crescent and star design, evoking a common symbol for Islam. (Uh, yeah. It's sort of a star, yes, and sort of a crescent, but ... oh, hell, if Fox is going to cut and paste from Wikipedia, we can too. Behold an earlier Missile Defense logo, with star and crescent, and the dread stars-crescent-and-mattress logo of the Strategic Defense Initiative!)

The logo, which first appeared on the Missile Defense Web site in the fall, was designed by TMP Government, a marketing and communications firm that has managed Web site redesigns and logos for numerous government agencies, including recovery.gov and more than a dozen Defense and intelligence-related sites.

But this particular one has caught the eye of critics of the Obama administration. (I wonder if there's a reason for that.)

"I'm having trouble seeing past the crescent and star in the new logo," one critic posted on WashingtonTimes.com. "Is this our signal to the muslim world that we're not going to shoot down their missiles?"

Another poster on WeaselZippers.net likened the logo to that of a "corny science fiction movie." (In quoting a few of the less certifiable posts, Fox manages to overlook the late-breaking resemblance to the Iranian space agency's logo, which -- aw, you peeked! -- is conspicuously lacking in stars. You can see how you wouldn't want that to get in the way of a good story.)

But others said it was all in the eye of the beholder, and that they saw little or no similarity between the Obama and Missile Defense logos.

Richard Lehner, a spokesman for the Missile Defense Agency, dismissed the comparison entirely.

"It's ridiculous," Lehner told Fox News. "It isn't a new logo to replace the official logo. It's a logo developed for recruiting materials and for our public Web site. Also, it was used prior to the 2008 election and it has no link to any political campaign."

So either he's lying or what the WashTimes calls the "Obama Missile Defense Agency logo" actually dates to the -- what do you call it, the Bush administration? Yeah, that's it.

This is a slightly more paranoid -- oh, all right, vastly more paranoid -- version of the perpetual deity-on-a-taco story, except that at Fox, it's actual high-end political discourse. It's not technically made-up, as long as you have a very loose operational definition of "abuzz" and the critical thinking skills of a garden slug. But it's more or less impossible to think of any circumstances under which it would qualify as "journalism."

Words don't often fail me, but some days you can hear the old rivets popping more distinctly than others.