I’ll shout out a full blown FUCK YOU to Jerome Corsi for yet another attempt to swiftboat a democratic presidential candidate. His dumbass book ** The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality** [I’m not even going to link to the frigg’in book] is a trash filled diatribe of worthless, lying facts. NPR yesterday fact-checked the book and it is full of lies and exaggerations that some people in America are sure to gobble up as raw facts. You can hear the story here at NPR.com. There are no words to describe how idiotic some writers can be when they do not want someone to be president. The idiocy is exemplified when they publish a book with blatant errors in it and try to pass them off as raw facts. FUCK YOU MR.CORSI - ASSHOLE!
I don’t understand… I looked at the book jacket the other day and it said it was “scrupulously sourced with more than 600 footnotes.” It also describes itself as “stunning and comprehensive.”
It debuted at #1 on the NY Times best seller list. Terrific.
Point-by-point correction of some of Corsi’s errors of fact.
(Curiously, he doesn’t even seem to touch on the question of whether Obama’s birth certificate is a forgery . . .)
I like looking at both sides of every coin. So reading something against the person I am campaigning for is just as important as knowing why I am voting and campaigning for him.
This book is full of crap. I brought it back to a used bookstore in town and sold it back for trade credit. The guy taking the books in laughed and said he wouldn’t even open the book, but that there would certainly be people who will…sadly.
ETA: Thanks for the link BrainGlutton
Didn’t you hear?They turned up the real one.
The number 1 on the non-fiction list is a load of crap, too. That’s due in large part due to huge bulk purchases. Ross Perot was the first to come up with that ploy - buy thousands of copies of a book so that it gets the sheen of legitimacy by being high on the NYT best seller list.
Most of the right wing zealot book become best sellers in the fashion. At one point, some of the more wingnutty authors (Coulter was one, I forget the other) threatened to sue their publisher because they weren’t getting the royalties they felt they were owed. Because the publisher wasn’t crediting them for selling the books they were buying back by the ton to inflate their numbers.
It’s all part of the well-oiled right wing noise machine.
Has a far longer pedigree than ol’ Ross. Been around for many a year, probably still is, works like this:
Congressman Shitpherbrayns pens a historic document on the fundamental issues facing the American people, The Ten Fundamental Issues Facing the American People. The well respected firm of Remainder House is so excited at this stirring tome that they offer the Honorable a very generous cut of the take, a percentage that Stevey King would kill for. As it were.
The CEO of Wesayso Corp., in another display of civic virtue so common amongst the boardrooms of America, purchases thousands of copies to distribute amongst his employees. (He gets a perfectly reasonable tax write off, for his support of, ah, education.) (That the Honorable is Chair of a committee that can step on his air supply tube at any time is merely a coincidence.)
Now, please note: the Wesayso Corp is not, repeat, not bribing the good Honorable, there is no squid pro ho here. Wesayso writes a check to Remainder House, who writes a check to the Honorable. All perfectly legal and above board, civic motivations abound.
Dark rumors have circulated that these books are not really printed, only sold, Remainder House pretends to buy the paper and cover stock, (writing off the expense), pretends to print and pretends to ship. They do, in fact, print *some * copies to ship to bookstores so they can ship them back, or try to flog them on the Bargain Table for one dollar. (That’s where I got my copy of Newt Gangrene’s 1945…wildly overpriced.)
Once the books are “shipped” and “puchased”, they’re gone, poof! Who can prove anything? The Honorable is happy, Wesayso Corp is happy, Remainder House is happy, and the Honorable has a number one bestseller (nonfiction) to brag on.
What’s not to like?
So why don’t they do that with Nancy Pelosi’s book, currently #3,1999 on Amazon.com?
Well, that was a flub on my part, these books, by and large, never ever get any notice. They are not supposed to be noticed, drawing attention is not the purpose. Counter-productive, actually.
Nancy Pelosi has a book? I’ll read it, but I expect a 5,000 year reduction in my afterlife penance, and reincarnation as a rich womans favorite cat.
Here are some charming anti-Catholic, antisemitic, anti-Muslim and homphobic screechings posted by Corsi on Free Republic (from his postings it’s hard to believe this guy has a PhD in Political Science. He’s the kind of moron that calls everybody a COMMUNIST! in all caps).
Also, he’s a plagiarist.
Obama needs to be more aggressive than Kerry was about fighting back against this little bitch. He can’t count on the media to do it. Fox News has been going down this guy for like two weeks. If someone wrote a hatchet job like this on Mccain that was as filled with as many provable falsehoods, written by an overt racist and admitted plagiarist, the media would waste no time destroying it (look what they did to something as compaatively mild as the NYT article on McCain’s coziness with (and possible boning of) that lobbyist. As long as it’s a Democrat being slandered, the "MSM won’t lift a finger.
Well, on the plus side, you get to pick the rich woman. Elizabeth Taylor? Oprah? Angelina Jolie? 
Why would they? It’s not like they do it with every single book.
I have no problem believing that Corsi’s book is selling well. Right wing political hate porn always sells well. Facts don’t matter to the audience for these books any more than the plot matters to those who watch gay army guy porn (and there’s a pretty big overlap between those two audiences). They just want something to stroke to.
I heard that story, too, on my way home from work. I really hope Corsi gets some serious Karmic retribution, the sooner the better. If he were unable to ever publish another book, that would be a start. What really pisses me off is the fact that the he and the publisher put so much effort into making the book appear to be factual - putting in footnotes, describing it as “thoroughly researched and documented,” “[s]crupulously sourced,” and “[m]eticulously researched and documented.” (Quotes taken from the book’s Amazon page.) In fact, as the NPR story made clear, he continues to perpetuate lies that have long since been discredited. It really pisses me off that this asshole can get away with it. I wish Obama would sue him for libel.
Why doesn’t he sue him for libel? I don’t know the ins and outs of sueing someone but this is ridiculous.
It’s a good bet that this book got a once-over from the proverbial “team of lawyers” to assure that it doesn’t rise to the level of libel. But it would be an interesting gesture, anyway.
The bad way that this ends is, you sue someone for libel, you are unable to win, and that is used as evidence that the book is 100% true.
Eventually this book will be vetted fully and some sort of online wiki will be set up to counter every page and footnote, and then 95% of the people who buy and read the book will completely ignore it. And there will remain some dregs of uncontested accusation, which will then be used to prove that the rest of it is 100% kosher.
Essentially this is a built-in audience, it’s the lowest-risk book that will be put out all year, in terms of sales. It’s a no-brainer. The fact that it feeds the political ambition of Republicans is almost beside the point.
John Kerry is running a new website called Truth Fights Back, which is being funded through his PAC.
Read the full email here and pass it along.
Oh come now. It was scrupulously researched:
Television! What more could one ask for?
So, is anybody writing half researched, factually untrue books about John McCain, and if not, why not? Isn’t that something that somebody should be doing?
I think it’s mostly just that McCain has been around so long, that people feel that they know him, even if they don’t. Most people didn’t really know John Kerry, so this angle worked on him, too. And there were several hitpieces on Bush (perhaps more factual, but MMV).
Obama makes plenty of people nervous, creating a hole to fill with justification. There is money to be made in filling that hole (as well as, perhaps, an election to be won).