A few minutes before President Obama strode to the lectern Thursday night for his jobs speech to a joint session of Congress, conservative pundit and Tea Party firebrand Dana Loesch used her Twitter account to take note of a Tennessee congresswoman's plus-one for the address.

"Love that Marsha Blackburn invited Henry Juszkiewicz,"� Loesch excitedly told her more than 22,000 followers, referring to the Nashville Republican's guest, who's the CEO of Gibson Guitar Corp.

The invite was a definite nose-thumbing at the president, whose administration inadvertently helped turn Gibson, currently under investigation for the kind of wood it uses, into a rabble-rousing battle cry for the Tea Party and conservative media establishment.

The strange journey of the...