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Bear with me on this one. It’s a long post, but trust me, you’ll be glad you waded through it.

You guys know about Pamela Gellar, right? She’s one of the more colorful and unstable right-wing bloggers. At her blog Atlas Shrugs (no, I refuse to link to it), Ms. Gellar can be found spinning bizarre conspiracy theories, sputtering furiously about various slights against conservatives (some real, but mostly imagined), crusading for the obliteration of Islam (and all who profess its faith), and generally reveling in her own lack of tact. In the pantheon of crazy wingnut luminaries, she’s usually lumped in with Ann Coulter (because they both have ladyparts, they both perform what right-wing extremists apparently perceive to be sexiness, and that’s pretty much it. Well, that and their shared affinity for tastelessness), but she’s really more at home with crackpots like Pastor Grant Swank, Confederate Yankee, and Michael Savage. Y’know, monstrously stupid people with a penchant for fantasy. Gellar adds a heapin’ helpin’ of Michelle Malkin-style spite and sheer, spittle-flying hatred, just for good measure.

Pam’s rise to prominence can probably be attributed mostly to her aforementioned ladyparts (there’s nothing a right-blog dweller likes more than a woman they can imagine both discussing politics and having sex with), but also to the wonderful way she spins clusters of right-wing fantasy into intricate, yet wildly implausible conspiracy theories that, though they bear almost no resemblance to anything found in the realm of the possible, satisfy as many wingnut yearnings as possible. These baroque, almost inspired webs of Grimm Brothers-esque fiction usually follow the same trajectory: Gellar posts an extremely long, poorly sourced, increasingly preposterous story on her blog, claiming definitive proof of the awfulness of some liberal or group of liberals. Her commenting readership immediately posts adulatory paeans to her genius (no doubt typing one-handed), and shortly, her creation ripples throughout the right-wing blogosphere (which seems preternaturally predisposed to turning the spread of every story into a particularly erratic game of telephone). Inevitably, one left-wing blog or another (usually the incomparable Sadly, No!) starts mocking her story, leading her and her acolytes to ratchet up their certainty. A thorough debunking usually follows, though Gellar and her circle only rarely admit their errors, preferring instead to pretend the whole thing never happened (or, increasingly, drop the subject immediately, only to resurrect it later as common knowledge beyond the necessity of argument). A few days or weeks pass, and the cycle begins anew.

All of this is just background to explain why I’m so excited about her latest theory, which blows all the others out of the water. In the span of almost 12,500 words (all in a single post, mind you), she lays out her Grand Wingnut Theory of Barack Obama, which includes most of the conspiracy theories already surrounding the candidate, and accounts for many controversial (and not so controversial) figures lately linked (often only by rumor) to Obama, before introducing a whole new group of right-wing boogeymen supposedly now connected to Obama and his sinister plot to turn America into an Islamic Socialist Republic. You wanna know what the core of this grand theory is?

Barack Obama’s real father was Malcolm X.

Let that sink in a bit.

OK, stop laughing, because it gets funnier. The whole thing is based on new information recently gathered in the right-wing blogs’ grand crusade to discredit Obama’s Hawaii birth certificate (the theories vary on where he was actually born: Kenya, Indonesia, Canada, Cuba, the USSR, etc.). That information, responsible for spawning this theory, is that Obama’s mother was enrolled at the University of Washington for the term that included Obama’s birthdate. You see, apparently, if you’re enrolled at a university, you are unable to leave its campus in the middle of the term. Or something like that; I’m not really sure why her enrollment status at a university proves she couldn’t possibly have given birth in Hawaii, but I guess it does, to these folks.

See, what Gellar believes REALLY happened, is that Obama’s mother was somehow impregnated by Malcolm X (details are very sketchy about how that might have come to pass), and she fled to Hawaii, where she was less likely to be discriminated against for having a biracial child. Once there, she waylaid Barack Obama, Sr. (who, Gellar asserts with exactly zero evidence, was the only black man in Hawaii at the time) and convinced him to marry her and pretend to be her baby’s father. Gellar doesn’t bother to explain why, in 1960, some random dude from Kenya would have been a more socially acceptable father to her li’l bastard than Malcolm X, especially given Ann Dunham’s apparently unapologetic embrace of Communism (according to Gellar). But that’s neither here nor there: the fact remains that, in a couple of photos she dug up online, Obama looks more like Malcolm X than Barack Obama, Sr. Though her commenters make various gross assertions about a resemblance in lips, ears, and nose, Gellar hangs the physical similarity argument on the men’s respective heights: Barack Obama, Sr. was a mere 5’10″, whereas X and Obama, Jr. are both approximately 6’2″ or 6’3″! I guess she’s never heard about that whole thing about childhood nutrition being as important a factor as genetics for determining height.

Anyway, the great conspiracy to hide the identity of Obama’s true father makes him seem like a Marxist Luke Skywalker: somehow, Barack Jr. was deemed, Damian-style, to be some sort of Promised One for the Communists, and in order for the worldwide socialist conspiracy’s master plan to install him in the Presidency to work, his father’s identity must be carefully hidden from all, including Obama himself, lest the terrible truth be revealed (“No! You’re not my father! That’s impossible!”). Somehow, this all implicates the usual suspects (Rezko, Ayers, Wright, Khalidi, etc.), as well as a new cast of Sith lords, including Elijah Muhammad, Louis Farrakhan, Saul Alinsky, Carol Moseley Braun, Sani Abacha, Jesse Jackson, and a whole bunch of other scary, flush-with-melanin characters.

So, there you have it. I must admit, this particular fantasy makes me very happy, because these people must be really, really scared of what’s coming on Tuesday in order to buy into this stuff. Just five more days…

(OK, I couldn’t resist: if you have the stomach for it and a lot of free time, here’s the actual post in all its psychotic glory.)