The extreme-right way to make a buck - Corsi product of publishing industry that feeds off extremism

[jefferson_dem]

The extreme-right way to make a buck
Jerome Corsi, author of a pitiful new slam on Obama, is the product of a publishing industry that feeds off extremism.

Tim Rutten
August 16, 2008

The fact that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson's famous friendship recovered from the acrimonious presidential campaigns of 1796 and 1800 is a monument to 18th century detachment and the mysterious power of genuine human fellowship.

From those first two contested general elections to the current presidential campaign, American politics have been a blood sport, and what we now call "negative advertising" always has been a weapon of choice. As any honest political consultant will tell you, there's a reason for that: Negative advertising works; it always has.

Even so, Jerome R. Corsi's controversial new book, "The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality," occupies a class of its own. Corsi, you may recall, was the coauthor of "Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry," the campaign diatribe that slimed the decorated Vietnam War veteran and then-Democratic presidential candidate's war record.

Corsi is frank about his motives for writing "The Obama Nation." As he told the New York Times this week: "The goal is to defeat Obama. I don't want Obama to be in office."

That's clear enough from the text. You can pretty well sum the whole thing up this way: The Democratic candidate is a deceitful jihadist drug addict who, if elected, plans to impose a black supremacist, socialist regime.

Obama's campaign learned from Kerry's experience, and you can go to its website to see a point-by-point, factual rebuttal of Corsi's book. Other organizations -- notably Media Matters -- have posted similar analyses. It's pretty convincing stuff, not least because Corsi so frequently refers to the Illinois senator's own books and almost invariably gets it wrong.

What's far more interesting is how somebody like Corsi suddenly becomes a player in a presidential campaign. Start with the fact that the author isn't a conservative in the normal or respectable sense of that word. He's actually a regular on the far-right, hate fringe of Internet journalism, whose day job seems to be as a correspondent for a new extreme right-wing site, where he specializes in stories about how George W. Bush is conspiring to eliminate the border between the United States and Mexico. (You really can't make this stuff up.) The project he put aside to write his anti-Obama screed was an expose of all the secrets about 9/11 your government still is keeping from you.

If the music you seem to hear playing in the background sounds familiar, it's because ... yes, you've crossed over into the Twilight Zone.

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http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-rutten16-2008aug16,0,2221518.column

[catnhatnh]

1. But why does it...

...never feed off LEFT-wing extremism??? I'm serious here-Name a hit book published against "W" in either of his runs. What hit piece against McChucklenuts is awaiting publication??? Is it because left-wingers would hate easy money and refuse to wtite it (because in that case,I'm in), or because no established printing house would print it without the guarantee of fake "bulk purchases" and phoney listing as a New York Times "Best Seller"??? Because without the sub-rosa guarantee, Corsi couldn't get a gig writing menus for the local Chuckie Cheese...just sayin'....