Do you a remember an episode of the Twilight Zone that featured Billy Mumy as a farmboy named Anthony who had special kinetic powers? On a whim he could put an extra head on an animal or change the weather, and when his experiments went awry — as they did when he turned a man into a human jack-in-the-box — he sent them into the cornfield. The adults who lived on the farm with him were scared of him, because he could also read their thoughts, and whenever he did anything gruesome they would force themselves to smile and say, “That’s a real good thing what Anthony did!”

I thought of that episode the other day watching the regulars on CNN interact with Lou Dobbs. The once mild-mannered business reporter has turned into a bloviating machine in recent years as his obsession with illegal immigration has made his show a ratings juggernaut, and the Dobbs brand a household word. He writes books, he has a radio show, and he is fond of answering email from adoring fans. “You are a breath of fresh air!” read a typical Valentine from last evening’s cable broadcast. “Thanks for holding Democrats and Republicans accountable.”

Whatever CNN’s faults (and they are legion), most of its political reporters are sober, objective types and when they appear interacting with Dobbs, as they must, they smile and nod and don’t scream what many of them must be thinking (“Shut up already, you pompous windbag!”) because, like those folks on the farm, they are afraid — afraid of his following. His show averaged about a million viewers in March, about a half a million less than the network’s 2000-year-old-man, Larry King, and significantly less than Fox’s Bill O’Reilly, who enraged about three million people a night that month, mostly with footage of Reverend Jeremiah Wright. If they aren’t nice to Lou he might just up and move to Fox.

Not that he would necessarily fit in there. As a self-proclaimed defender of the middle class, Dobbs loves to tweak the US government for its dealings with China, or US corporations for shipping jobs oversees — unpopular positions at the Murdoch owned, business-friendly Fox. But he likes his vendettas almost as much as O’Reilly does and for good old-fashioned Obama hating, he gets marks for persistence. Last night’s panel of regular suspects (former Huckabeee flack Ed Rollins, Clinton-friendly Daily News columnist Michael Goodwin, and Clinton-pledged superdelegate Robert Zimmerman) provided the amen chorus before the backdrop of Dobbs’s question of the evening: “Do you believe there is a media bias against Hillary Clinton in favor of Barack Obama?”

Dobbs is best known, though, for frettin’ about our friends south of the border. His broadcast is a litany of NAFTA-bashing, drug-smuggling stories and decent folks who’ve had enough of wetbacks stealing their jobs. His gravest nightmare is probably captured in this video which features a norteno of the future recruiting accountants and programmers from the sidewalk, where they have lined up, looking for work (“But you must speak Java”). Me, I keep wishing CNN would send this guy to the cornfield. When he got there he’d find out that everyone spoke Spanish. After all, America runs on Mexican.