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Friday, Oct 31, 2008 2:05 PM UTC

October surprise: Who’s Obama’s real father?

As Election Day approaches, paranoid theories about Barack Obama are getting even weirder -- now, one well-known blog is suggesting that he's the son of Malcolm X.

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Topics: 2008 Elections, Barack Obama, War Room,

Brace yourselves, people: Barack Obama’s real father isn’t Barack Obama, Sr. His real father is — wait for it — Malcolm X.

No, I’m not being serious. But that is the claim being made on Atlas Shrugs, a pretty well-known right-wing blog. (How well-known? Its proprietor, Pamela Geller, has interviewed John Bolton, who served as, essentially, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations earlier in the Bush administration.)

So if you thought the paranoid theories about Obama couldn’t get any crazier, clearly you were wrong. In fact, there are now so many floating around that no one can even seem to get their conspiracy theory straight. Andy Martin, the anti-Semite who was a source for one of Sean Hannity’s specials about Obama, has retracted his earlier smear, when he said Obama was a Muslim; he now believes Frank Marshall Davis, a Communist, is Obama’s real father. On the other hand, Jerome Corsi, the co-author of the book that launched the Swift Boat Vets, has a new article out at WorldNetDaily claiming that in fact Obama and his grandfather used to hang out with Davis at his hot dog stand in Hawaii, which was really just a front for selling cocaine and marijuana. (Corsi’s “source” for this one apparently has an uncanny ability to remember in detail just how much cocaine he was buying 33 years ago, not to mention when he bought it and who he bought it from. Very believable.)

Also, Obama has apparently been using the power of hypnosis to brainwash people  into voting for him. Here’s a snippet from a recent post at the blog of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, a right-wing group:

Is Barack Obama a brilliant orator, captivating millions through his eloquence? Or is he deliberately using the techniques of neurolinguistic programming (NLP), a covert form of hypnosis?

Techniques of trance induction include extra slow speech, rhythm, tonalities, vagueness, visual imagery, metaphor, and raising of emotion. Hypnotists often have patients count. In a speech after the primaries closed, Obama said: “Sixteen months have passed (paused)…Thousands (pause) of miles…(pause)…Millions of voices….”

Obama actually said at one time: “a light will shine down from somewhere, it will light upon you, you will experience an epiphany, and you will say to yourself, ‘I have to vote for Barack.’”

You will not choose to vote for Barack: you will “have to.” It is not a logical choice, but rather one directed by a mystical (subconscious) force.

 

Alex Koppelman is a staff writer for Salon. More Alex Koppelman.

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