The anti-Obama rhetoric of the first stages of the McCain-Obama race has been laced with falsehoods, unfair innuendos, and sneaky appeals to religious fundamentalists. One of the worst examples is Dr. Jerome Corsi's abominable snow job on Barack Obama: his book "The Obama Nation." Unfortunately this fallacious book seems to be getting just as much publicity as his notorious Swift Boat attack on the previous Democratic candidate did. How come? Advance teams of conservative activists hit independent booksellers across the country to bulk order and raise the profile of "The Obama Nation." Obviously, some conservatives still presume that readers will accept vicious untruths if they are endlessly repeated.
True, the Obama campaign put out its "Not Fit For Publication" pamphlet rebuttal with alacrity, but falsehoods and nasty innuendos are out there in an echo chamber, bouncing from book jacket to blog to talk radio, and McCain's poll numbers suddenly are up. On a recent trip to California, my suspicions were raised by seeing someone ordering the book pre-publication -- the same book I would see piled high in airport book stores ten days later.
On the Sunday when author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn died, the mood was somber at the Moon News bookstore in Half Moon Bay, California -- a laid-back town best known for its fog-misted pumpkin fields and monster waves offshore at "Mavericks." I watched a woman stride up to the counter at the hippest book shop on Main Street and demand that copies of Corsi's book, not due to be released until two days later, be put on special order.
The book store's manager, Carole Brehm, felt that this strident behavior was out of place in the literary hub of coastal San Mateo county, where she does a brisk trade in Bush Countdown key chains that show how many seconds remain of the Bush presidency. It didn't take her long to find out that the book is a crude hatchet job, a Swift Boat redux. She canceled the order.
Pre-orders helped put Corsi's nasty screed at the top of the New York Times best seller list in its debut week. In Half Moon Bay and other enclaves of sanity on the California coast, there is now a movement to get the book reclassified as fiction. Down the coastal highway at Bookshop Santa Cruz, like-minded customers already have started to circulate petitions.
Corsi blogs on WordNetDaily, a stridently partisan right-wing political website, and it's telling that his book title isn't even original. It's lifted from red-state bumper stickers and an organization known as Christians for Social Justice, which defines an Obama nation as "a country that supports wicked, immoral actions," and cites black preachers who rail against the Illinois senator for his "slippery slide down the slopes of depravity."
Hal Linsday, who occasionally wields an evangelical poison pen on WordlNetDaily, likens Obama to the anti-Christ. This crackpot statement gives Bible-belt nuance to some otherwise baffling McCain ads that claim Obama has messianic pretensions.
When will these scurrilous attacks on Obama end? Only when McCain decides to abide by his promise of fairness and disavows all unfair political polemics targeted at his rival.