originally posted on The Nation

The right wing is filled with hate and insanity, but every now and then someone does something that manages to shock even the most jaded observer. This week brings us three particularly over-the-top right-wing nuts. First, there’s James David Manning, a New York City pastor and birther—did I mention he’s black?—who has “inside information” about Newt Gingrich’s black father. The inside information is actually an inference based on his deductive reasoning and Gingrich’s middle name: “Newt’s real name is Newton Leroy McPherson. Nobody on the planet names their children Leroy except black people, just like nobody on the planet names their sons Hector except Hispanic people.” Newt Gingrich being “miscegenated,” as Manning puts it, by a white mother and “a liberal but educated black man” explains why Gingrich is so “erratic.” “But that ain’t all,” says the pastor, who goes on:

“Mitt Romney? His name is Willard! WILLAAAAARD! I think that he’s probably the son of a pyscho and that’s why he acts the way he acts. And I believe that Willard has some black blood in his too…. Somewhere down the line.”

Manning even hypothesizes about the circumstances under which Newt and Mitt were conceived. Demonstrating a fetish for hot rich-white-women-on-black-sleeping-car-porters romance, the man of the cloth fantasizes that

“these politicians’ and rich people’s wives used to take these long train rides and these sleeping car porters didn’t have anything to do, the women were bored…and the black sleeping car porter Leroy and Willard, they were there serving coffee and tea with their white jackets and black pants on. And Mrs. Romney and Mrs. McPherson took ’em in the sleeping car. These black men in the sleeping car.”