Fight the Smears

Jerome Corsi’s “The Obama Nation” is a mishmash of unsupported conjecture, half-truths, logical fallacies and outright falsehoods.

Corsi is a renowned conspiracy theorist who says that George Bush is attempting to create a North American Union (we looked at that here) and that there is evidence that the World Trade Center may have collapsed because it was seeded with explosives. More recently, Corsi claimed that Obama released a fake birth certificate. We’ve debunked that twice now. And, as our colleagues at PolitiFact.com found, many of the themes in “The Obama Nation” are reworked versions of bogus chain e-mail smears.

In Corsi’s case, we judge that both his reputation and his latest book fall short when measured by the standards of good scholarship, or even of mediocre journalism.

In its timing, authorship and style of reporting, the book [Obama Nation] is strikingly reminiscent of the one Mr. Corsi wrote with John O¹Neill about Mr. Kerry, “Unfit for Command,” which included various accusations that were ultimately undermined by news reports pointing out the contradictions. (Some critics of Mr. Kerry quoted in the book had earlier praised his bravery in incidents they were now asserting he had fabricated; one had earned a medal for bravery in a gun battle he accused Mr. Kerry of concocting.)

But books like “Unfit for Command,” which remained for some 12 weeks on the Times best-seller list, and, now, “The Obama Nation,” have become an effective and favored delivery system for political attacks. There have been anti-Clinton (both Bill and Hillary) and anti-Bush books too numerous to name. The sensational findings in these books, true or dubious, can quickly come to dominate the larger political discussion in the news media, especially on cable television and the less readily detectible confines of talk radio and partisan Web sites.

Several of the book’s accusations, in fact, are unsubstantiated, misleading or inaccurate.

The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality” collects false rumors and distortions to portray Obama as a sort of secret radical who can’t be trusted.

Jerome Corsi, author of “The Obama Nation,” has a record of making offensive comments about the pope, Muslims and Democratic politicians, as well as promoting fringe theories about plots to merge the United States, Canada and Mexico into one country.