The Abominable Snow Job Of "The Obama Nation"

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.

Follow Jan McGirk on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jmcgirk

Comments

[JanMcGirk]

Over at Bookshop Santa Cruz , in the self-declared "Nuclear Free Zone" of California, I am told the staff will weigh the tomes of Rush Limbaugh and his ilk and then sell them at the equivalent price of baloney.
It's a great gag, but is it true ? If you're a bookstore browsing Cruzer, please let us know.

[BethStuart]

There's a very interesting article on the background of Corsi in today's Boston Globe. He's apparently had several "careers" none of which he's been particularly successful at. In one of them, he shifted his assets into his wife's name to protect them from angry investors. Here's the link:

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/08/20/failed_venture_follows_anti_obama_author/

[officewag]

Jerome Corsi somehow coinciding with the deceased Nobel laureate from the Gulag-- talk about ironic timing. Maybe cuz most of Corsi's footnoted political prevarications are so blatant, they remind me of the excesses of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's grim world.

"It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes," Solzhenitsyn wrote. "We make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions - especially selfish ones."

Another astute point which has been reflected in the Republican nightmare of the past 7 years: "A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny. "