Someone just IM'd to ask me why I didn't include nutcase Harlem preacher and youtube star James David Manning in my Root article on viral video and Obama. You guys have nothing to do all day except wait for your RSS feeds to update or something?

First off, I was on the high volume James Manning beat long before you were, so back the fuck up off me. (I would turn your speakers down before clicking the link above.)

Second of all, my piece is about viral video, not foul-mouthed Kooks from the Outer Limits of Human Belief. (That's one of my favorite books, BTW. I lent it to someone and never got it back.)

But the latest Reverend Manning clip - TRINITY OF HELL! - is above for my faithful ebogites. I should say that my naturally pervy (as in media pervy) inclinations make me a bad go-to guy on topics like Manning, not bad so much as unstrategic. I find him kind of fascinating because I find the aesthetics and rhetoric of American kookery fascinating in general. Manning is actually an amateur in terms of his kook-kung fu, being mostly just funny as opposed to crystal-bullet-through-the-forehead novel like, say, the Nuwaubians.

Speaking of which:

But the thing about Manning is that the somewhat smug amusement he inspires in me likely keeps me from understanding his use value in transmitting smears about Obama. (Too much irony is worse than none at all, to misquote Machine.) For example, Manning takes the stillborn "Obama=gay" meme and tries to revive it by casting the Wright-Obama fracaso as a lovers quarrel, and then piggybacks that on the already well-circulated "Oprah=lesbian" meme. It's completely bananas (like Manning) but not a bad example of kook electoracial psy-ops. If a version of that story pops up again on, say, FOX, we know who to blame.

...me for embedding that video and context-shifting it so that it seems less crazy? Doh!