Candidate receives crucial endorsement

Manuel Roig-Franzia's piece on Cynthia McKinney in the Washington Post today begins:

Spies.

They're "probably" in the room, she says ominously.

Listening. Conspiring. Taking it all down.

Cynthia McKinney thinks we're being watched, and she says so, leaning into the mike. The crowd of several hundred in this Atlanta public library auditorium -- graying Black Panthers gathered for a reunion, a pamphleteering Revolutionary Communist Party guy, Pan-African liberationists -- mostly nods in agreement. . . .

Some of McKinney's theories of government:

She believes there are "credible reports" that the U.S. military dumped 5,000 prisoners -- each with "a single bullet wound to the head" -- in Louisiana swamps using Hurricane Katrina as cover.

She believes that Jeb Bush -- the president's brother -- facilitated Colombian drug shipments into the United States when he was governor of Florida.

She believes the "corporate media" are censoring stories about the United States "restarting dirty wars in Latin America" and about "Bush's real problem with Eliot Spitzer," a head-turner that she dangles without specifying which Bush she is talking about or explaining.

"We don't really know who killed Martin Luther King," she says, rolling now as she addresses the Panther group in the auditorium. "We don't really know who killed Bobby Kennedy. We don't really know who killed John Kennedy. We don't really know who killed Tupac Shakur."

Abe Lincoln was gay.

McKinney travels in a rented Hyundai Sonata, taking turns driving with an aide who has accompanied her on at least one all-night drive from Maryland to Louisiana. Her skeleton staff frequently has no idea where she is. The calendar on her campaign Web site is empty. Her phone goes unanswered; the box for her voice mail is full.

She is a Candidate of Mystery.

Candidate of Mystery. She's gonna be a Candidate for Involuntary Commitment if she's not careful.

When she surfaces, as she did for two appearances and a live Internet discussion one recent weekend in Georgia -- the state that sent her to Congress six times and kicked her out twice -- she's got a lot to say about a lot of things, but not much about running for president. . . .

Maybe not, but she's said enough to garner one important vote:

She is joined onstage for a panel on FBI spying by Ward Churchill, a former star University of Colorado professor who provoked outrage by writing that Sept. 11 victims were "little Eichmanns" and not "innocent civilians." For her part, McKinney was ridiculed in the months after the attack for suggesting that the Bush administration knew more than it let on before planes hit the World Trade Center.

Churchill says he has never voted for president, not wanting to validate an "occupation" government that seized land from Native Americans.

But he voted this year.

For Cynthia McKinney.

"She's got integrity," Churchill says.

Anybody else thinking what I am? Yep: wife number six (right after Lynne Stewart).