How Ex-SNL Star Victoria Jackson Became Queen of the Far Right

Not too long ago, Victoria Jackson was the helium-voiced "Saturday Night Live" cast member who always seemed to play the ditz. Now she's a Tea Party princess who co-hosts a right-wing version of "The View" and sings songs about how Obama's a Muslim. How'd that happen?

As writer Gus Garcia-Roberts discovered in this week's cover story, the transformation has a lot to do with Jackson's Bible-beating background, the fact that she lost her virginity to a fire-eater who performed in blackface, and the attention she received when she first started saying the president prayed while pointed towards Mecca.

Whatever the reason for the evolution, what's clear now is that Jackson has found her niche. As Garcia-Roberts writes, "calling her the lunatic fringe is at most half right."

Victoria has been invited to the office of Florida Republican congressman Bill Posey, who commiserated when she said Obama has "the fakest birth certificate I've ever seen in my life." She has gained a sympathetic audience with nearly every GOP candidate of the 2012 presidential campaign (excluding the guy she calls a "fake conservative," Mitt Romney). She rode the Tea Party Express bus with Herman Cain and joined Michele Bachmann at a D.C. rally where the crowd chanted, "There's a communist living in the White House!" If not the captain of the S.S. Tea Party, she's at least the screeching mermaid strapped to its bow.

Victoria Jackson: Crazy...for America.