Suggestion: The Dems should distribute "Dreams From My Real Father"

Bobby Jindal says that gay marriage will lead to the end of the second amendment.

If you want my view as to why Mitt Romney is behind, all you need do is mull over the implications of that statement. No, I'm not saying that Romney's troubles have anything to do with Jindal himself, or with gay marriage. Rather, I'm saying -- have been saying for quite a while now -- that the Crazy Virus has taken over the GOP, and that the public's fear of infection may keep both the Oval Office and the Senate out of Republican hands.

Mitt made that suicidal "47 percent" remark because he has been huffing Crazy fumes. I don't think that Romney would have uttered such an inane Ayn Randism ten years ago, or even five years ago.

The choice of Ayn-droid Paul Ryan also exemplifies The Crazy:

Do you know what Old People love? Their socialized healthcare. Mitt Romney picked, as his running mate, a man famous primarily for formulating a plan to eliminate the single-payer healthcare system our old people would kill to defend.

When the Ryan choice was announced, right-wing pundits all agreed that Mitt's pick would bring out the base in droves. What these brilliant strategists refused to understand is that, under our electoral college system, it doesn't matter if you increase the Romney vote in places like Alabama or Texas. What matters is Florida.

And Ohio. Speaking of which...

Republicans haven't yet awakened to the fact that multimedia extravaganzas like Dreams From My Real Father, however much they may fire up the faithful, will hurt their cause in the long run by making all conservatives look like a gaggle of conspiracy loons.

So this is what it’s come to.

After four years of invective, four years during which the right has called President Obama a traitor, a communist, a fraud, an affirmative-action case, a terrorist-sympathizer, and a tyrant, its shrillest voices have been reduced to the most primal insult of all. They are calling Obama’s mother a whore.

For a while now, pictures purporting to show Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, modeling in 1950s bondage and fetish porn have been floating around the darker corners of the Internet. Now, though, they’ve made their way into a pseudo-documentary, Joel Gilbert’s Dreams From My Real Father, which is being mailed to voters in swing states, promoted by several Tea Party groups and by at least one high-level Republican. At the same time, Dinesh D’Souza’s latest book, Obama’s America—the first of all his works to hit the top spot on The New York Times bestseller list—has a chapter essentially calling Dunham a fat slut. If Obama is reelected, it’s hard to imagine where the right goes from here.

The film (which I have not yet seen) claims that Obama's real father was black American socialist leader Frank Marshall Davis, who allegedly took nude photos of Obama's allegedly slutty mom and sold them to fetishists. A sham marriage to a Kenyan student was arranged because -- well, I'm not sure why. And I'm not sure why Barack Obama Sr. would later come to America to visit his son.

Apparently, the film also works in the CIA angle, which derives, ultimately, from a mangled (or Madsen-ized) version of something I wrote back in 2008. I'd like someone to explain to me why the Agency would recruit an alleged fetish porn queen. (Did they also make an offer to Bettie Page? I bet she would have looked very cute in camo gear training at Camp Peary...)

What matters here is not that a lone crank made a vulgar conspiracy video, one that outdoes even birther propaganda in its lunacy and bad taste. It’s that the video is finding an audience on the right. Gilbert claims that more than a million copies of Dreams From My Real Father have been mailed to voters in Ohio, as well between 80,000 and 100,000 to voters in Nevada and 100,000 to voters in New Hampshire. “We’re putting plans in place, as of next week, to send out another 2 [million] or 3 million, just state by state,” he told me.

Dig: Conservatives carpeted Ohio with copies of this film -- and now Obama is ahead by ten points. Cause and effect...?

Maybe the Democrats should (quietly) distribute the thing.

The larger story is that these conservative Crazy cats have inhabited Planet Kook for so long that they've lost sight of how repellent they seem to normal people. And that's why, in what should have been very favorable election year, the GOP couldn't find a candidate who stood a better chance against Barack Obama.