Call him the Sanjaya of politics. Stephen Colbert's sarcastic quest for the presidency has established a legion of followers on Facebook. A Facebook group, 1,000,000 Strong For Stephen T Colbert [login required], grew to a million in just over a week according to The New York Times.

Similar groups for legitimate candidates have taken months to reach the elusive milestone, and some haven't reached it.

When the Founding Fathers installed the electoral college, they did so based on the fear that the masses might make a terrible mistake and elect a bad leader. But could they ever have envisioned the possibility of a campaign that started as a joke gaining steam?

Maybe American Idol needs an electoral college too.

Right this moment (I imagine), a flavor expert somewhere deep in the Vermont offices of Unilever ADR (NYSE:UL) unit Ben & Jerry's is asking a very, very difficult question: What does a celebrity taste like? And which celebrities do we even want to associate with vanilla ice cream, raspberry swirl and brownie bits (that would be Dave Matthews) or fudge-covered waffle cone pieces, ripples of caramel, and the patriotic vanilla ice cream (yep, Stephen Colbert).

BloggingStocks may be the only organization brave enough to wonder, should Jerry Garcia really taste like cherries and fudge? and which celebrities are the ice-creamiest? Does anyone buy the ice cream just because they like the celebrity, and, isn't that a bit weird? Do you want to taste the people you most admire? And is this all a liberal hippy conspiracy to keep ice cream Democratic?

Let's begin by exploring where this whole celebrity-ice cream flavor thing started: Jerry Garcia. He and his band the Grateful Dead, well, let's just say that may have been where the term "groupie" started. People who love the Grateful Dead, they love the Grateful Dead. Oh, my, lord. So for the liberal (and then independent) company to name a flavor after the hippiest of all hippy icons, well, totally made sense. Are you familiar with the history of celebrities and ice cream? If you do, you know that Cherry Garcia was the first ice cream ever named for a rock star, and appeared in 1987 at the suggestion of two deadheads from Portland, Maine.

Because I'm very serious about my work, I sent my husband out in the dark of night for a quart of Cherry Garcia, the flavor that started it all, and the number one flavor on Ben & Jerry's flavor roster. Cherries and "fudge flakes" (which seem very much like "pieces of chocolate" to me, but I'm not the one describing the flavors on the package) are mixed into cherry ice cream. Does Cherry Garcia deserve its place on the top of the roster? And is it because of the taste of the ice cream, or the connection with the band?

I howled when I watched this last week but had no idea I would actually find it on the Internet. But of course I would. Clips from The Colbert Report are all over YouTube, why not this particular one of Colbert claiming Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) owes him $700 million from Google's purchase prise for YouTube then? Here's how Colbert, in his 'truthiness' fashion, figures this out:

"...my show is all over the YouTube. You put my name into YouTube, you pull up more than 26 hundred videos, that's gotta be like a third of all videos. That means I've got $500 million coming to me. That doesn't even count the times we mention YouTube on the show."

Colbert then counts the times he indeed mentioned YouTube, and for each mention he adds $50 million to the $500 million he already calculated. The last mention is even a complete fake voice over. Too funny.

Well, Google, Colbert will accept cash or money orders.

You can watch the video on YouTube for yourselves of course.

Via Google Blogoscopped.