Roy Edroso breaks it down — and everything he says is right on: Back when I did a regular “rightbloggers” column for the Village Voice, I covered a few of the loonier rightwing conspiracy theories those folks promulgated. I didn’t make a habit of running them down, though. I thought the bloggers’ and web propagandists’ ridiculous interpretations of major events were loony enough themselves, and also more germane to way conservatives were polluting our political discourse and indeed our politics, than the occasion crackpot cock-and-bull story about, for example, Barack Obama’s secret gay life. Back then, despite what Tommy Lee Jones said in Men In Black, what one might read in the supermarket tabloids or their web equivalents was not considered the best investigative reporting on the planet. Not that I didn’t occasionally enjoy the spectacle of conservative writers working one of these obvious slanders for political advantage — as when, for example, a transparently fake claim that Michelle Obama had gone on a rant about “Whitey” was, during the 2008 Presidential race, circulated by operatives, promoted by rightbloggers, passive-agressively shoveled into the mainstream by National Review (“My guess is that even most Democrats recognize she’s capable of remarks like that”) and then, when it became clear no one was going for it, reimagined by some of these guys as a Democratic dirty trick against Republicans to make them look like credulous fools. But by and large in those days I ignored the political-celebrity-specific conspiracy theories that were most popular among the rightwing rabble — such as the…