The Obama campaign referred to several major liberal bloggers as the “tinfoil hat crowd” in a statement to Fox News Wednesday. The campaign was responding to the cable channel’s request for a comment on an Internet conspiracy theory many of them had promoted.

Shortly after the presidential debate last week, a number of liberal bloggers including ones at Daily Kos, FireDogLake, Democratic Underground, and the Daily Beast’s Andrew Sullivan, among others, began posting items suggesting that Mitt Romney had cheated during the debate.

The theory was that, as some video of the event appeared to suggest, Romney slipped a folded piece of paper out of his pocket and onto his podium just before the debate started. The bloggers suggested this was a “cheat sheet.” The theory was pretty clearly debunked. The paper was in fact a handkerchief … that Romney was shown later in the debate mopping his brow with.