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.

Fox’s Special Report with Bret Baier somewhat belatedly weighed in on the issue during its Wednesday broadcast. Baier noted a Washington Times story that suggested the Obama campaign planted the “cheat sheet” story in the blogs. Fox asked the Obama campaign for its reaction. Spokesman Ben LaBolt provided them with the following statement:

No — We’ve never casted our lot with the tinfoil hat crowd.

Granted, it was a bogus Internet meme, but that is still a fairly harsh remark for what after all popular liberal voices on the web. Do those bloggers know the administration apparently holds them in such low regard?