Eric Alterman on Jerome Corsi's Obama Nation

How do you solve a problem like Jerome Corsi? Put yourself in the position, momentarily, of Mary Matalin, who heads up Threshold Editions, the conservative imprint of Simon & Schuster. (The publisher has no "liberal" imprint.) He has a manuscript he wants you to read about Barack Obama. The first thing you'd do, if you take your own reputation—as well as that of the publishing house you represent—seriously, would be to do a little research on the fellow.

In the case of Jerome Corsi, that's not exactly heavy lifting; the man is all over the place. Max Blumenthal, writing in The Nation, pounded a little (entirely proverbial) pavement and discovered that Corsi has a history of running a shadowy investment venture in Poland that, in 1995, lost his investors $1.2 million and invited an FBI investigation. Corsi also has written quite a few books. His most famous effort, "Unfit for Command," a dishonest account of John Kerry's military service is well known. Others included one with "prophecy expert" Michael Evans, called "Showdown with Nuclear Iran," which demanded an US attack on that nation, while another of his tomes, called, Black Gold Stranglehold, purported to debunk the "enslave[ing]" Americans: "the belief that oil is a fossil fuel and a finite resource." Yet another was called "The Late Great USA: The Coming Merger with Mexico and Canada." You can guess what that one is about.

Corsi also has an extensive publishing history. Blumenthal unearthed a column he authored for the WorldNetDaily*, in which he revealed John McCain to be a dangerous rube who "has enjoyed strong support from a lobbying group that backs...a Muslim terrorist group with ties to criminal drug networks and Al Qaeda." Meanwhile, his buddy George W. Bush, he has explained has allowed "communist China" to "run its gunboats up the Mississippi."

Should any of these published works and comments have provoked your interest, you might have decided to do a little digging. Here, for instance is an Internet positing your aspiring author put up under the screen name "jrlc." "Anybody ask why HELLary couldn't keep BJ Bill satisfied? Not lesbo or anything, is she?" This one too: "Isn't the Democratic Party the official SODOMIZER PROTECTION ASSOCIATION of AMERICA--oh, I forgot, it was just an accident that Clintoon's [sic] first act in office was to promote 'gays in the military.' RAGHEADS are Boy-Bumpers as clearly as they are Women-Haters--it all goes together."

Ok, you get the point. Corsi is not exactly the kind of fellow who'd be welcome at a Matalin/Carville dinner party, much less one attended by the higher-ups at Simon & Schuster, home of many of America's most respected and admired authors and editors. He is, at the very least, the kind of author for whom—-again, if you cared even slightly about your reputation-—you would demand airtight sources for every accusation he made.

You may say I'm a dreamer. And you'd be right. My colleagues at Media Matters have apparently spent more time fact-checking Corsi's book on Obama than anyone at Simon and Schuster did and have compiled dossier after dossier of what others more vulgar than yours truly might term "pure bullshit." (The most extensive version is here.)

The thing is, hardly anyone cares. Charles Kaiser reported in RADAR that the New York Times did not even ask Simon & Schuster's representatives whether a fact-checker had been hired to vet the book (though I can promise you that lawyers were to ensure that nothing to legally actionable.) Mary Matalin proudly claimed that the book "was not designed to be, and does not set out to be, a political book," but "rather, a piece of scholarship, and a good one at that." It appears that in regard to this lie, she did not bother checking with her author who has explained, "The goal is to defeat Obama," Corsi told the New York Times. "I don't want Obama to be in office."

I will admit, dear reader, that I only skimmed the thing. I was on the plane home from Denver and in a great mood over Obama's incredible speech and it was painful to be reminded, not of the quality of Corsi's work-—I read this crap for a living-—but of the unwillingness of the mainstream media to mediate between truth and falsehood when it comes to the most crucial questions they face. Some of the book is so stupid as to be funny. For instance Corsi scores Obama for employing a blogger named "Sam Graham-Felsen" who admits to being a "student" of Karl Marx in college. In the first place, I doubt Obama actually hires his own bloggers. But more to the point, isn't everyone who studies economics at any decent university in America a "student" of Karl Marx? Wasn't Milton Friedman a "student" of Karl Marx, if only to refute him? Never mind, he quotes Little Green Footballs asserting that the blogger is "a hardcore Marxist" and another blogger I never heard of saying that the fellow "seems to hate what most Americans love," before demanding, "How possibly can Obama argue his association with radicals such as Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn was a long time ago, when he continues to recruit a Marxist sympathizer such as Sam Graham-Felsen to be an official blogger of his 2008 presidential campaign?" (p.151) How indeed? And this is one of the few places where Corsi might be telling the truth. But the overall effect is not funny at all. True, the book is not as successful as Corsi's previous crusade against John Kerry, but in that case, he was dealing with a candidate who refused to fight back regarding evidence that was extremely difficult to refute. In this case, it's not only clear we are dealing with lies but also with an extremely delusional human being; one who put aside a 9/11 conspiracy theory to rush this piece of trash into print. And while the MSM has not been afraid to challenge some of those lies—"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 August 1" as the New York Times so politely puts it, no one's standing in the publishing world, literary community, much less the conservative movement has been challenged as a result of their association with this piece of naked, dishonest character association. 475,000 copies in print; # 1 on the Times bestseller list for weeks straight. Success of any kind, speaks for itself.

When I published When Presidents Lie: A History of Official Deception and Its Consequences four years ago, I posited my belief that during the Bush presidency, our society had entered into a "post-truth" society where evidence no longer applied to such monumental questions as war and peace. This was before conservative Republicans embraced the Swift boat lies as part and parcel of their political operations. (Long after the so-called Swift Boat Vets and POWs for Truth spread demonstrable falsehoods about John Kerry's war record, for instance, the editors of the Wall Street Journal endorsed their lies as "no doubt contentious, but...of a piece with the contemporary bipartisan standards of adversarial politics."

With the success of crazy Jerome Corsi's newest effort—despite our knowledge of his past and its immediate debunking by both Media Matters and the Obama campaign—this cancerous growth on our body politic can be said to have metastasized. And we have not only Mary Matalin, Simon & Shuster, the Wall Street Journal editors, and the rest of conservative media machine to thank, but also ourselves, for continuing to tolerate them in our midst as colleagues. They are not. This book is a crime against truth, decency and democracy. Those who helped it into print and promoted it afterward are themselves the moral equivalent of criminals as well. If we can't jail them, we can at least shun them, starting now.

*Correction: The original version of this article erroneously identified the WorldNetDaily as "Scaife-funded."