IT WAS DURING RUSH HOUR at the Pen and Pencil Club, that frantic hour between closing time everywhere else in Center City and the 3 a.m. last call at the bar of the storied journalists' club on Latimer Street, when I turned to the attractive companion of a friend of mine who had arrived for a nightcap and asked, "So what do you think of Barack Obama?"

I know, I know, it sounded like a pick up line, especially since my friend's attractive companion happened to be an African American woman in her 30's and I could expect a warm and enthusiastic response to my inquiry, or perhaps a guarded counter-question asking what I thought of Barack Obama. What I wasn't expecting was her reply. "I think he's a sleeper."

I beg your pardon. "I think he's a sleeper," she repeated. Since Obama's presidential candidacy is picking up momentum like a freight train on a down slope I knew she couldn't mean "sleeper" as in a candidate that comes out of nowhere to win the nomination -- say John McCain six months ago. "You mean you think he's an enemy agent?" I said and she nodded yes.

Now I have heard that such people exist but I've never met one face to face and she certainly didn't fit whatever stereotype I had imagined an Obama-is-a-sleeper-Islamo-fascist-agent true believer. So I walked her through a series of questions to establish that she wasn't a). drunk, b). putting me on, or c). out of her freakin' mind. By the time I had established that she was none of the above a number of people were listening to my interrogation and joining in with questions of their own.

"If he was a sleeper, why would he keep a name as obviously foreign as Barack Hussein Obama?" That's part of the plan, she said. Hide in plain sight. "If he becomes president, what is he going to do? Surrender? Declare Islam as the state religion of the United States?" She wasn't sure, but whatever he did would be at the bidding of some unnamed mastermind in the Middle East. She also pointed out that Obama's step father was a colonel in the Iraqi or Iranian army. "What?!"

In the end her opinion was backed by no hard facts, merely an internet fed conspiracy that she embraced "hole" heartedly despite more gaps in logic than slice of swiss cheese. Faced with such an intractable position at so late an hour there was only one thing to do, fight rumor with rumor. "You know who's the real Manchurian candidate?" I said. "Which presidential candidate spent years of torture as a foreign prisoner of war?" Mister McCain? Mister John SIDNEY McCain?