"Politico isn't reprinting Sinclair's allegations because they are unsubstantiated." So wrote Ben Smith of Politico on June 18, 2008.

Those were the days!

Smith was referring to Larry Sinclair, who had enraged the Obama faithful by renting space at the National Press Club, there to share his allegations of a drug-fueled sex tryst with Barack Obama in 1999.

Smith, however, was not at all shy about sharing what he knew about Larry Sinclair. Indeed, by the end of the Politico article, the reader knew more about Sinclair, all of it unsavory and most of it likely true, than he did about Obama.

That much said, when Sinclair made his own case at the National Press Club – unfiltered by attorneys and unaccompanied by Gloria Allred – he did so in exquisite and oddly believable detail.

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Sinclair claimed to have fellated Obama twice during their two-day encounter, but he said it as matter-of-factly if he had shaken his hand or slapped his back.

The accusation Sinclair had come to make had to do not with sex but with drugs. According to Sinclair, he and the then-state senator shared a few lines of cocaine before Obama procured some crack for the two to smoke. As Sinclair related, Obama's claim that he had not done drugs since college was a lie.

When the Obama camp first became aware of Sinclair's accusations in 2007, an Obama liaison, "Mr. Young," reportedly contacted Sinclair to tease out the story.

Through numerous calls and text messages, Young let it be known that he himself was intimately involved with Obama. After some back and forth, at least according to Sinclair, Young finally told Sinclair that Obama did not intend to be any more forthcoming about his drug use.

Allegedly, Sinclair and Young last communicated in early December 2007. A few weeks later, according to the police report, Donald Young, the openly gay choirmaster of Obama's church, was found dead at his "residence" of "multiple gunshot wounds."

According to an earlier police report, on Nov. 17, 2007, Larry Bland, another allegedly gay member of the Trinity United Church, was also found dead in his "home" of "multiple gunshot wounds."

At the press conference, Sinclair made no accusations. He simply shared the phone numbers he had for Young and Obama and asked the reporters to check their records against his own during the relevant time periods. They seemed disinclined.

In the Q & A, the first reporter asked why Sinclair had not come forward in 1999. To the reporter, this failure apparently undermined Sinclair's "credibility."

Sinclair chuckled, as he should have, at the question's absurdity. What sense would it have made for him to rat out a lowly state senator on a drug and sex escapade he himself had initiated?

Sinclair had come forward in 2007 and done his first YouTube video in January 2008. At the time, Hillary Clinton would have been the obvious beneficiary. That did not stop the second reporter from asking whether Sinclair was being funded by the Republican Party. Sinclair laughed this one off, too.

Despite his best efforts and an occasional piece in the Globe, Sinclair's story reached its high water mark on that bizarre June day at the National Press Club.

His name remains as foreign to Obama fans as Juanita Broaddrick was to Bill Clinton's. The Democrats who rush to the Internet each day to find new allegations about Herman Cain sleep safely knowing that their man has nothing to fear from an inquiring media.

As to Misters Bland and Young, the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of this story, they do not have so much as a Wikipedia page. Not surprisingly, their cases remain unsolved.

I am more than occasionally asked whether Obama is on the DL, the "down low," the never-never land inhabited by black men who see homosexuality not as a lifestyle to celebrate but as a compulsion to indulge.

I refer these inquiries to HillBuzz founder and editor Kevin Dujan, a self-described "former centrist Democrat-turned-Independent-turned Out and Proud Conservative." As a resident of Chicago's "Boystown," Dujan has an insight on this subject that I lack.

Upset by the preposterously disparate attention Herman Cain has endured for his real or imagined peccadilloes, Dujan on Monday shared what he knew about Larry Sinclair and related subjects. It is worth the read.

Unlike Cain, Obama has not had a single charge leveled against him by a woman. For Obama fans concerned about re-election, this is a mixed blessing.

"Cosby never got the girl on 'I Spy,'" Obama laments in his 1995 memoir "Dreams from My Father," but in his own retelling, he does not do much better.

Although Obama spent 13 years on the mainland as a single man, on only one occasion in "Dreams" does Obama make any reference to his love life.

In a brief recounting, he tells his half-sister Auma that in addition to a white woman he had loved and lost, "There are several black ladies out there who've broken my heart just as good."

The problem is that Obama shares with the reader not a word about any of the black ladies, and not one of them has come forward on her own.

The white woman in question presents a different set of problems. In terms of height, hair color, eye color, parentage, and highly specific place of origin – namely a large country estate with a lake in the middle – she is a dead ringer for Bill Ayers's lost love, the late Weatherwoman, Diana Oughton.

One can imagine the conversations between Obama and his muse. "Hey, bro, we got 457 pages on the bachelor king of Chicago, and you don't get so much as kissed?"

"Make something up, Bill. Just be sure it's by a girl."