It finally happened: my obsession with MSNBC has dovetailed with legitimate movie news! Sort of!

Tonight the New York Times broke the news that over a year ago, Dan Mirvish (filmmaker and co-founder of the Slamdance Film Festival) and Eitan Gorlin (whose directorial debut, The Holy Land, won the Grand Jury Prize at that festival and was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award) made up a fake adviser to John McCain named Martin Eisenstadt. On Monday, MSNBC’s David Schuster reported on air that Martin Eisenstadt had taken credit for the “Palin thinks Africa is a country” leak. Eisenstadt had indeed published a post on his blog (tagline: “Because freedom isn’t free”) claiming to be the leaker, which no one at MSNBC bothered to look into deeply before Schuster’s report, otherwise they might have discovered that Eisenstadt a) is a made up person, and b) didn’t actually talk to Carl Cameron, the Fox news reporter who broke the “anonymous sources say Palin doesn’t know Africa is a continent” story.

MSNBC weren’t the only ones snowed – The Huffington Post, The National Review and The Los Angeles Times have all previously used Eisenstadt’s made-up blog full of made-up insider information as a source. TV Newser started digging into the story yesterday; they posted an email “from” “Eisenstadt” which, in retrospect, probably should have tipped all of us off. “It’s strange for me (and all a bit Hegelian) to get requests to prove that I exist,” writes “Martin,” before insisting that “every single blog that says I am a ‘hoax’ has emanated from a single, bitter individual who for some reason has a vendetta against me - a golf blogger allegedly named ‘Wolfrum.’” William K. Wolfrum’s blog looks so overtly hoaxy that it might actually be not a hoax … except that at the end of the Times story,”Wolfrum” himself seems to imply that he doesn’t actually exist. I think.

In any case, above you can watch the first part of a fake BBC documentary Mirvish and Gorlin produced about Eisenstadt, called The Last Republican. Gorlin plays the, uh, titular lead, and he does a superb job of saying things like, “We can bomb every rainforest back into prehistory, but we’ve got to have some kind of economic model that people can embrace,” and “Bill Kristol was my counselor in Zionist summer camp”, with a straight face.