One For The True Believers

It sounded too amazing to be true:

"Senator Obama exited the limousine with two hundred fifty dollars ($250) I had given him and returned a short while later with an “eightball” of cocaine which he gave to me. I did ingest a couple of lines of cocaine, and shortly thereafter Senator Obama produced a glass cylinder pipe and packet of crack cocaine from his pants pocket and Obama smoked the crack cocaine. I performed fellatio on Senator Obama in the limousine during the time Senator Obama was smoking crack cocaine, after which I had the driver take me to the my hotel..."

And it was (not that that will stop the McCain team from pushing it every chance they get).

When Larry Sinclair stepped off the press conference stage at the National Press Club today, he was arrested. You have to wonder why they didn't arrest him BEFORE the presser, but never mind.

The thing is, his arrest came about thanks to a bunch of bloggers. Go see the Mitch And Nan Show for the whole story, including this:

"To the good people of Mitchandnan,

Never in my life have I been put through what “he I shall not name” has put me through.

I have always trusted in the goodness of people and thus posted info I found from other sources to rebut the attacks against Obama....

4 bloggers have saved my life and so too have you all. I will not name the 4 helpers as I wish they be free of ”he I shall not name’s” attention. I lost hair and weight and nearly my love of life. Now while being sued I have come to understand more about our legal system and I am no longer fearful, but maybe angry at the outrageous abuse, and open warrants that were not served; if they were, this never would have occurred..."

You can make a difference. If you try.

UPDATE: The British are very good at taking the piss, and this reporter who was at the presser does just that:

He took the stage looking both a little nervous and a little like Martin McGuinness. That, of course, is not a crime.

What is a crime, as Mr Sinclair was only too happy to relate, are the acts of deception, cheque and credit card fraud to which he has confessed and for which, in at least one instance, he has served jail time. He is still a wanted man in the state of Arizona.

Mr Sinclair had in tow a lawyer called Montgomery Blair Sibley. The grandeur of Mr Sibley’s name was matched only by the grandeur of his attire. He was resplendent in a kilt, not exactly a common get-up in these parts.

The clothes were rather more impressive than Mr Sibley’s legal credentials. His license to practice has been suspended in both Florida and the District of Colombia.

Monty Python could not have done justice to the moment when Mr Sibley, a man hired presumably to lend credibility to the occasion, chose to explain the presence of his kilt with reference to the size of his manhood, which we were given to understand is too substantial to be shackled by the cloth of conventional underwear and trousers.

“I don't know why men wear pants,” he said. “It's a function of male genitalia. If you're size normal or smaller, you're probably comfortable. Those at the other end of the spectrum find them quite confining.”

At this point the pent up tension dissolved into open laughter among reporters...

But of course:

There is a very serious point to all this. Mr Sinclair became visibly unsettled and irritable when questioned about the source of his funds.

He said he has had no contact with any Republican groups and that he would release his financial records. But this was one of many things he promised to make available in the future –his medical records were another since he is suffering from a brain tumour—and you would have thought he would have presented them himself if he were genuinely expecting to make anyone believe him.

Would he release the details of his donors? Yes. But not their names. It is not clear how that constitutes releasing details of the donors.

There remains the lingering suspicion that attack groups will pay people like Mr Sinclair to keep their allegations in the public eye and Mr Obama out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

As I predicted earlier, this is the beginning of the end of the GOP. Not that that will matter much. Those who have controlled the GOP for the last 20 years or more have already moved onto the world stage. And nobody is waiting to arrest them when they get off.