I recently cornered an enthusiastic distributor of every whackjob conspiracy theory listed on the Mother Jones master chart, and he finally admitted that he knew--at least on some level, some of the time--that none of the smears is true. But he went on to explain that mere facts don't matter because he feels compelled to "warn the country about Obama".

You wouldn't expect an extremist to see the logical Grand Canyon yawning there--what exactly is he warning us about if all of his charges are known to be false? That one's not hard to figure out, if we're honest with ourselves about the source of the insane rage against our black President.

Rather than try to analyze whether a given smear is true or not, I've come to view them as analogous to words or phrases in a vocabulary of hate. Each false smear ultimately reduces down to a single primal thought: "I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!".

What matter isn't what they believe, it's that they're so hungry to believe it. That's the real message conveyed by the right's comprehensive program of sedition. While I don't doubt that there are political operatives and fundraisers happy to exploit the situation, at its heart it's the opposite of calculated.