In this forum in the past I may have sublty implied a belief that Bin Laden is dead. Oh, like, say in this post headlined, “Bin Laden is Dead.”

A three-year span without any video pronouncements or any audio that was conclusively of recent vintage certainly suggested that he was either dead or incapacitated. But now we have this.

As James S. Robbins, senior fellow for national security affairs at the American Foriegn Policy Council points out in this piece, Bin Laden seems to be monitoring the Democratic debates and/or perhaps Bill Maher’s television program to harvest his talking points.

Others have speculated that if the beard is indeed fake, Bin Laden may be hiding out in a place where Muslim men do not typically have beards, such as Indonesia or Malaysia.

It is also noteworthy that according to the leaked transcript, Bin Laden once again affirms that he is responsible for the 9/11 attacks. This, of course, won’t have any impact whatsoever on the weak-minded conspiratorialists who are convinced that the brilliantly-evil, yet-stupid Bushhitlerburton was behind the attacks.

That’s right, after only eight months in office Bush was able to engineer a global conspiracy that arranged for planes to be hijacked and flown into buildings AND explosives placed in those buildings to assure they fell down AND to have another airliner shot down by military jets over Pennsylvania, all in the same hour AND make it all look like Al Qaeda terrorist did it—all in order to have an excuse to invade Iraq for some oil and some Halliburton contracts.

And yet, in the four years following this all-powerful criminal mastermind couldn’t arrange to have a few WMDs planted in Iraq to legitimize the whole operation. Right. Got it.

For a frightening microcosmic glimpse into the dark fever swamps of conspiratorial thinking, just check out the comment thread under this article over at ABCNews.com. Scroll down a bit to find the nuts and flakes.

Keep in mind, those comments are actually a model of of sanity and reason compared to what you will typically find in the comment threads over at The Daily Kos, The Huffington Post and the Democratic Underground.

Abandon your grip on reality on ye who enter there.