Jerome Corsi helped destroy John Kerry in 2004 with a hatchet-job, “Unfit for Command,” that became the basis for the entire Swiftboat smear. It worked once, so Corsi’s giving it another shot.
Almost exactly four years after that campaign began, Mr. Corsi has released a new attack book painting Senator Barack Obama, the Democrats’ presumed presidential nominee, as a stealth radical liberal who has tried to cover up “extensive connections to Islam” — Mr. Obama is Christian — and questioning whether his admitted experimentation with drugs in high school and college ever ceased.
Significant parts of the book, whose subtitle is “Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality,” have already been challenged as misleading or false in the days since its debut on Aug. 1. Nonetheless, it is to make its first appearance on The New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction hardcovers this Sunday — at No. 1.
The book is being pushed along by a large volume of bulk sales, intense voter interest in Mr. Obama and a broad marketing campaign that has already included 100 author interviews with talk radio hosts across the country, like Sean Hannity and G. Gordon Liddy, Mr. Corsi said on Tuesday.
Mary Matalin, who is publishing the book on her division of Simon & Schuster, offered one of the more amusing responses in recent history, said Corsi’s hatchet-job is not a “political” book, but rather, is “a piece of scholarship, and a good one at that.”
That Matalin sure is a kidder.
Media Matters has already done terrific work highlighting a series of obvious and demonstrable falsehoods in Corsi’s latest screed, in response to which Corsi has accused Media Matters of “nitpicking.”
Look, if the text is a “piece of scholarship,” and Corsi’s accusations fall apart under scrutiny, it’s not nitpicking, it’s fact-checking, and it should have been done a long time ago.
Greg Sargent did a nice job summarizing some of the more glaring errors that have already come to light.
* Corsi’s book says that Mr. Obama had “yet to answer” whether he “stopped using marijuana and cocaine completely in college
, or whether his drug usage extended to his law school days or beyond.” Corsi even adds, “How about in the U.S. Senate?” But as the Times points out, Obama has written his memoir that he “stopped getting high” in the early 1980s. That’s lie number one.
* Corsi’s book, amusingly, uses Newsmax.com as a source for the falsehood that Obama was present at a sermon in July of 2007 where Reverend Jeremiah Wright faulted “the ‘white arrogance’ of America’s Caucasian majority for the world’s suffering, especially the oppression of blacks.” In fact, Obama wasn’t at that sermon. Even conservative columnist Bill Kristol issued a correction after trafficking in the same falsehood. That’s lie number two.
* Corsi says that Obama failed to dedicate his book “Dreams of My Father” to his family, an apparent effort to suggest that Obama lacks family values. But The Times reports that Mr. Obama did dedicate the book to several family members in the introduction. That’s lie number three.
It’s probably safe to assume the list will continue to grow as time goes on.
And what does the Obama campaign have to say for itself?
Mr. Obama’s campaign has yet to weigh in heavily on Mr. Corsi’s accusations. It appears to face the classic decision between the risk of publicizing the book’s claims by addressing them and the risk of letting them sink into the public debate with no response.
“This book is nothing but a series of lies that were long ago discredited, written by an individual who was discredited after he wrote a similar book to help George Bush and Dick Cheney get re-elected four years ago,” said Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for Mr. Obama. “The reality is that there are many lie-filled books like this in the works cobbled together from the Internet to make money off of a presidential campaign.” He added, “We will respond to these smears forcefully.”
Kerry tried something similar when Corsi’s last book was published, and the strategy was, in retrospect, a mistake. Of course, there’s a key difference between the two campaigns — there’s no well-financed organization pushing Corsi’s latest series of lies in a national advertising campaign.
Yet.