So I went through the archives to help remind everyone just how many silly things the conservative press got all worked up about in the year 2010. (With a couple big items left out. Everyone stopped talking about the “Ground Zero Mosque” once summer ended, but it’s hardly been completely forgotten.)

Harry Reid said “Negro”

“Game Change,” a lengthy catalog of unimportant gossip masquerading as an account of the 2008 elections, was released to much media attention in January. While some people gravitated to the chapters about Sarah Palin or the ambitious power-crazed and insane Elizabeth Edwards, the right-wing media latched onto one silly line spoken by Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

In a private conversation, Reid said Barack Obama was “light-skinned” and had no “Negro dialect.” As I said, at the time, a 70-year-old white man saying “Negro” is embarrassing but not particularly shocking or outrageous. Any restatement of Reid’s point in more sensitive language — that Barack Obama could be president because he seems less “black”/threatening to old white people than major black politicians of the past — would’ve been mostly uncontroversial.

But Republicans have some major issues and hangups with regard to racial issues — they’ve convinced themselves that they’re a persecuted minority, basically — and so they all thought that because Trent Lott got in trouble for saying something awful a few years ago, it was only fair that Harry Reid get in trouble for saying something that they convinced themselves was just as bad, or worse. But Reid used inartful language to express a non-offensive point. Lott used perfectly polite language to express an awful argument: That America would’ve been better off with a segregationist president.

John Kyl and Michael Steele and John Cornyn — three Republicans who stood by Lott in 2002 — called on Reid to resign. He didn’t, and everyone more or less forgot about it.

Barack Obama’s uppity expression

Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds just innocently posted a picture from the White House Flickr feed, and asked his readers to “analyze the body language.” The point was clear: Obama looked smug and uppity. In case you didn’t get it, Glenn zoomed in on Obama’s face and cropped the photo to show his elitist eyes more clearly, and then quoted some reader mail: “If I really wanted to set my dad off, all I’d have to do is send him this photo.”

When Andrew Sullivan pointed out that Glenn was reading something bizarre into a random photo, Glenn proudly bragged that he goaded the liberals into playing the race card, which was, I assume, his goal all along.

Barack Obama yelled at the Supreme Court!

Once Bill O’Reilly’s done flirting with Megyn Kelly in the clip above, they both take turns purposefully misinterpreting Barack Obama’s criticism of the Citizens United decision at the State of the Union, then Megyn calls the act of criticizing the Supreme Court in the State of the Union “unprecedented.” Can you believe the nerve of this president, saying something critical of the Supreme Court while they’re sitting right there? Unprecedented! In fact, according to Megyn’s research, this had only already happened nine other times. But those other times weren’t that serious, while this was “a full-frontal assault on the justices who were sitting a stone’s throw away from him,” apparently.

Captain America hates the Tea Parties

In February, a panel in a Captain America comic book featured a bunch of protesters with Tea Party-inspired signs, and this really pissed off a bunch of tea partiers. They even investigated the comic’s author’s Twitter, where they discovered damning evidence that he was a a liberal. My favorite response: “This seemingly innocuous Captain America comic is, in reality, a grossly effective weapon of the leftists, for it captures the hearts and minds of children.

The Missile Defense Agency logo looks Islamic!

The Defense Department’s missile-developing agency got a new logo in February, and critics (Drudge) were quick to point out that it had a crescent-ish shape in it, and crescents are also present on Islamic flags, and therefore Barack Obama loves Iran.

The Nuclear Security Summit logo also looks Islamic

Two short months later, Pamela Geller and the New York Post and Fox News all noticed that the president’s Nuclear Security Summit logo also had a mysterious circular crescent-ish shape, just like the shapes on the flags of Muslim countries. (This logo was actually based on the Bohr model of the atom, but Niels Bohr was Danish and therefore probably a socialist.)

NASA is abandoning space to coddle Muslims instead!

In an interview with al-Jazeera, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said that Barack Obama charged him with inspiring children to get into math and science, expanding international relationships and reaching out to the Muslim world.

This is all fairly uncontroversial stuff, but conservatives exploded with outrage. It’s NASA’s job to send Americans into space to conquer the moon-men, not to encourage Islamofascists!

Barack Obama told Republicans to sit in the back of the car, which is reverse-racist

Everyone got sick of the president’s car-in-the-ditch routine before the midterms, but apparently telling Republicans to sit in the backseat of a car was an endorsement of racial segregation, according to Fox & Friends and Glenn Beck and Michele Bachmann.

Barack Obama doesn’t say the word “terror” often enough

As we all know, the best way to combat terrorism is to constantly talk about terrorism, all the time. But Barack Obama is scared to say the word terrorism, because he is a Kenyan socialist. Monica Crowley did some fine work popularizing this bizarre talking point, which of course became a Fox News recurring theme for a good month or so. Even Jim DeMint said Obama was unwilling to use the word “terrorism.”

Obama, for the record, says the word “terrorism” pretty often.

Barack Obama said the word “ass”

After some prompting from Matt Lauer, Barack Obama said he was talking to people dealing with the Gulf oil spill so that he could learn “whose ass to kick.” Apparently, this sullied the office of the presidency. (Among other things.)

Michelle Obama went to Spain!

In August, First Lady Michelle Obama took a vacation to Spain, with a couple friends and her daughter Sasha. Matt Drudge claimed that this trip would cost the taxpayers millions of dollars and Mickey Kaus said this proved that the first family was fighting and Maureen Dowd just said something that made no sense about Michelle bringing Barack martinis after work. (The friends paid for their own airfare and lodging, for the record.)

The White House bribed Joe Sestak!

According to Democratic Senate candidate Joe Sestak, the White House offered him a job in exchange for not running against Arlen Specter. (Actually, Bill Clinton mentioned some sort of unpaid role doing something terribly uninteresting. But the truth doesn’t matter.) While the White House said this never happened, the right-wing press decided that this was a terrible bribe and a violation of various laws. Rep. Darrell Issa got particularly excited, asking for a special prosecutor to be appointed. Then Sestak lost and no one cared anymore.

The White House also bribed Andrew Romanoff!

Someone at the White House apparently offered Colorado House Speaker Andrew Romanoff some sort of job in exchange for dropping out of the Senate primary. Dick Morris got all excited. But then Romanoff lost and no one cared anymore.

The White House forced Eric Massa to resign because of healthcare

Former Representative Eric Massa is, plainly, a weird, troubled guy. He was forced to resign in March because of complaints that he inappropriately touched staffers and generally created an uncomfortable work environment. But according to Massa, he was forced out because of White House dirty tricks and union thuggery. Rahm Emanuel confronted him naked in the shower and unions tried to bribe him into supporting the administration’s agenda! In Massa’s telling, his ouster was punishment for voting against cap and trade and healthcare reform.

Glenn Beck believed every word of this nonsense for like a day, until he had Massa on for what was perhaps the most entertaining hour of the Glenn Beck show ever.

Barack Obama’s trip to India will cost $200 million a day!

This one’s only a little more than a month old, but it had a short shelf-life because the sourcing was even dumber than usual for these sorts of things. One Indian news agency quoted an anonymous “top official” of an Indian state claiming that Obama, accompanied by 3,000 people, would spend $200 million a day during his trip to Mumbai. Rush Limbaugh, Drudge, the National Review, the Washington Times, the Daily Mail and every conservative blog under the sun ran with this incredibly dubious “report.” Then everyone shut up about it minutes after it was debunked and stopped being a useful attack.

According to Massa’s grand conspiracy, retired generals were telling him that Petraeus secretly met with Dick Cheney twice about running for president in 2012. Massa thought this was full-blown treason:

Massa shot him a look. “I know something about the Uniform Code of Military Justice,” he said. “And I want you to tell me how this is not a coup. You’ve got a commander with armies in the field, and he’s plotting with Dick Cheney to bring down his commander in chief. How is that not a coup? It’s Seven Days in May!”

Many people have speculated, for years now, that Petraeus might run for president in 2012. He has always denied political ambitions, but it would be no big deal if he did run, as long as he retired first. Petraeus has officially denied Massa’s allegations (which really didn’t need to be denied, because they are ridiculous).

The Justice Department began to probe those payoffs not long after initial reports that Ensign’s parents — wealthy owners of a casino resort in Nevada — had given at least $96,000 to the former aide, Doug Hampton, and his wife. What the Ensigns called a “gift” might be viewed as something else by federal authorities.

But now the Las Vegas Sun reports that Justice Department officials are investigating whether Ensign and his family committed a financial crime known as “structuring.” Structuring is essentially a form of money laundering — consciously attempting to evade federal regulation and oversight by trickling out a series of smaller sums, for example, rather than one large payment.

Sun political reporter Jon Ralston says that is what he was told by “a reliable source familiar with the deliberations occurring inside the Justice Department as federal authorities in Washington try to do with Ensign what they could not do with former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens: Get their man.”

The national and Washington press corps have mostly allowed Ensign to skate while skewering Charlie Rangel, Eric Massa and other Democrats, but Ralston has led the way on this wild scandal from the beginning. His assessment of the prospects for the Nevada senator and his party is blunt:

That the feds are looking at structuring as a possible crime will not surprise many old hands who have watched the sordid Ensign saga play out, morphing from a fairly grotesque he-slept-with-his-best-friend’s-wife-who-was-also-his-wife’s-best-friend story to a fantastically creepy tale of a senator trying to keep the cuckolded husband quiet by any means necessary, including, perhaps, structuring transactions with businesses in exchange for campaign contributions.

Maybe Ensign won’t be indicted. Maybe he will resign in exchange for not being indicted. Maybe he will serve out his term or even be re-elected. Would that be any more incredible than anything else we have seen? …

The question is how Justice might, ahem, structure a deal with Ensign. It is clear from observers — and from those who know the thinking inside the Justice Department — that the Stevens debacle has cast a shadow over the Ensign case.

The department is being very deliberate in assembling a case against Ensign. But Justice has a mountain of documents and e-mails that, combined with the senator’s own admissions or statements in e-mails, would seem to amount to a formidable case. And last week’s New York Times story, showing how Ensign’s contacts with a local company (similar to several other interactions), show how far the senator was willing to go to get Hampton work, mostly while he was employed by ex-Ensign aides who had formed a lobbying/consulting firm. The structure, so to speak, is becoming more transparent all the time.

This drip-drip-drip of revelation seems to have left Ensign unfazed, like a man who is slowly drowning but believes he can rise above it — or, perhaps, deludes himself into thinking he can walk on water. But as Republicans here and in Washington play the pathetic see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil game vis-a-vis Ensign, it is becoming more obvious that their craven behavior could be self-defeating.

Ralston even suggests that the Ensign affair, if and when an indictment results, might improve the poor reelection prospects of Senate Majority Harry Reid, D-Nev., who has long cultivated a friendly working relationship with his state’s junior senator. The Republican candidates seeking to oust Reid both have “foolishly” said they would welcome Ensign’s support. Among those who will privately laugh when Ensign is indicted or resigns is Bill Clinton. Ensign voted to impeach Clinton, called on him to resign, and was still insisting on his moral superiority to the former president on the day that he “apologized” for the “distraction” of his extramarital affair.

Massa’s interview with Beck was a hideous mix of self-flagellation, combativeness, dark conspiracy theories and awkward segues. On both sides. Once he heard Massa’s rant on a local radio station over the weekend, blaming White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel for all that is evil in the world, Beck simply had to put the guy on TV. Why bother doing any research ahead of time? The hour that followed proved that the two of them deserved each other; Beck tried to bait Massa into saying something — anything — inflammatory, and Massa tried to get Beck to look at photos of a tickle-heavy Navy ritual that Beck described as “like an orgy in Caligula.”

The whole tale that Massa was promising, which won him not just the Beck interview but also a good chunk of prime-time CNN “Larry King Live” exposure later that night, was too preposterous to be true but too salacious for cable news to pass up. Emanuel had gotten in Massa’s face — naked — in the House gym locker room, haranguing him to support healthcare reform. The groping charges and the sexual harassment investigation were just part of a Democratic leadership conspiracy to get him out of the House, so they’d only need 216 votes to pass the bill. But Massa was obliging them and resigning, because, as he told Beck, “I own this. I take full and complete responsibility for my own behavior.” And what about the cancer, which only a few days earlier had been the reason Massa said he wasn’t going to seek reelection? That didn’t come up until 10 minutes into the interview.

But Massa did pull a bit of a fast one on Beck, refusing to play along with his deranged suspicions. He blasted the constant fundraising the job requires (though he may have exaggerated the time he spent dialing for dollars), called for campaign-finance reform, backed away from his most over-the-top claims about Emanuel. The whole thing left Beck so disgusted that he apologized to his audience for wasting their time.

What still qualifies Massa for “Week in Crazy” honors, though, is that he went on TV in the first place. Why bother going through with these interviews once you’ve already resigned, especially if you’re not going to play along with the host’s crackpot theories? The tickling explanations didn’t exactly clear Massa’s name; on the contrary, the House ethics committee may still investigate what, exactly, was going on. And reports that came out later in the week made it sound like tickling wasn’t anywhere near where the story ended. “I’m going to show you more than tickle fights,” he told Beck.

The whole thing was so obviously a ploy for attention that it’s almost hard to believe the media went along with it. Almost. (Just ask Rep. Patrick Kennedy, who shouted at the press for doing just that.) Massa, though, did show one more glimpse of sanity toward the end of his moment in the spotlight. “In 72 hours I’m gone, and who cares?” he told King. And with that, he faded away, destined to become a Trivial Pursuit answer someday.