But Did Obama's Madrassa Teach Him That Fire Has Never Melted Steel?
David Weigel | August 15, 2008, 11:48am
The Barack Obama campaign doesn't usually come off as a bunch of generals fighting the last battle, so it's surprising that they're
blasting Jerome Corsi as hard as they are. Unless you're one of the lucky people who hired Lacuna Inc. to erase the 2004 prez campaign from your memory, you remember Corsi as the co-author (with John O'Neill) of
Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry.
But if you've paid attention to Corsi since then, you've watched him transmogrify into a laughable kook. First there was his abortive run-for-revenge, when he
planned to challenge Kerry for his Senate seat.
The co-author of the Swift Boat veterans' book that attacked Sen. John F. Kerry plans to move to the Bay State this year so he can challenge Kerry for his Senate seat in 2008.
"I'm going to do it,'' said Jerome Corsi, 58. "I've got serious political aspirations now.''
Obviously, he chickened out and wrote
Atomic Iran, a scare-em saga that hit when fear about Iran was peaking. He penned fairly mainstream conservative books until late 2006, when he got entangled with the immigration restriction movement. As far as I can tell, something snapped. In May he quit World Net Daily to explore a bid for president.
Corsi, who resigned as a WND staff reporter Monday, said he has joined the Constitution Party and is willing to explore a serious pursuit of the nomination.
"The issues that concern me the most are the need to secure our borders and the increasing pace with which North American economic and political integration are taking place under the Security and Prosperity Partnership," Corsi told WND.
He was working on
The Late Great U.S.A.: The Coming Merger With Mexico (which Amazon is selling with
The True Story of the Bilderberg Group), which came out months later. Corsi never actually ran for president, but about half of his reporting when he re-joined WND (I'm not counting his "futures market predicts Romney win in Florida" stuff) was North American Union scaremongering. Such as:
2/1/08 - Resolution fights North American Union: Urges U.S. to withdraw from Security and Prosperity Partnership
2/17/08 - 'Hola! Mexico!' says the Fed in Dallas
3/13/08 - Inside the hush-hush North American Union confab
3/18/08 - Mexican official says NAFTA includes superhighways
5/28/08 - 'North American Parliament' under way
And did I
mention his comments about 9/11? Ah, yes.
The fire, from jet fuel, does not burn hot enough to produce the physical evidence that he’s produced. So when you’ve got science that the hypothesis doesn’t explain–evidence–then the hypothesis doesn’t stand anymore. It doesn’t mean there’s a new hypothesis you’ve validated. It just means the government’s explanation of the jet fuel fire is not a sufficient explanation to explain the evidence of these spheres–these microscopic spheres–that Steven Jones has proved existed within the W.T.C. dust.
Corsi's of a piece with the PUMAs and Larry Johnson: a shit-flinging lunatic who discredits actual lines of attack on Obama whenever he sidles up near them. On balance it's good for Obama that our shiny-object-loving press has this to cover instead of McCain's subtle attack on him for not being hawkish enough on Georgia.
On second thought, the Obama campaign isn't fighting the last campaign. It evolved! Corsi sent a 5 mph pitch across the plate, and they took a swing at it.
John | August 15, 2008, 2:28pm | #
According to Amazon, the book has over 600 footnotes. Why hasn't the media checked everyone of those footnotes? Here is what Amazon says the claims of the book are
Barack and Michelle's 20-year-long religious affiliation with the black-liberation theology of former Trinity United Church of Christ Reverend Jeremiah Wright, whose sermons have always been steeped in a rage first expressed by Franz Fanon , Stokely Carmichael and Malcolm X, a rage that Corsi shows has deep meaning for Obama.
That is old news and pretty well known.
-Obama's continuing connections with Kenya, the homeland of his father, through his support for the candidacy of Raila Odinga, the radical socialist presidential contender who came to power amid Islamist violence and church burnings.
Is that true? Does he support this woman? What are his ties to her if any? How did she come to power and who is she? Those are all questions that any good reporter could answer.
-Obama's involvement in the slum-landlord empire of the Chicago political fixer Tony Rezko, who helped to bankroll Obama's initial campaigns and to purchase of Barack and Michelle's dream-home property.
Again, all of those things are verifyable. What was his relationship to Tony Rezko and how did they get the house? Those are facts that can be found out.
The background and techniques of the Obama campaign's cult of personality, including the derivation of the words “hope” and change”
-Obama's far-left domestic policy, his controversial votes on abortion, his history of opposition to the Second Amendment, his determination to raise capital-gains taxes, his impractical plan to achieve universal health care, and his radical plan to tax Americans to fund a global-poverty-reduction program.
That is pretty kooky stuff there. I honestly don't know how you would investigate that. That is just Corsi's opinion which I don't care about.
-Obama's naïve, anti-war, anti-nuclear foreign-policy, predicated on the reduction of the military, the eradication of nuclear weapons and an overconfidence in the power of his personality, as if belief in change alone could somehow transform international politics, achieve nuclear-weapons disarmament and withdrawal from Iraq without adverse consequences, for us, for the Iraqis or for Israel.
Again, that seems to be opinion and I don't care about Corsi's.
http://www.amazon.com/Obama-Nation-Leftist-Politics-Personality/dp/1416598065
The point is that if you think Corsi is a nut and don't want to believe him, that is fine. But Corsi or not, these allegations are out there. The media needs to look into the allegations and find out if they are true or not. If they are not true, then write a story saying how they are not. Doing that would go a lot further to putting the things to bed than just talking about what a kook Corsi is. Doing that and not talking about what the book says just makes me think there is something to to accusations.
joe | August 15, 2008, 2:29pm | #
John, you should sue your law professors for negligence.
http://www.writing-world.com/rights/libel.shtml
Public Official vs Public Figure
The same liberal rule applies to both categories: To prevail in a libel case against you, in addition to showing that your statement is untrue and caused significant harm, a public official or a public figure must also prove "malice" -- that you acted in reckless disregard to the facts known to you and with intent to harm.
Obviously, because of this stipulation, you enjoy considerable protection when it comes to public personages, since proving malice (intent to harm) places a heavy burden on the prosecution.
http://w2.eff.org/Misc/Publications/Mike_Godwin/net_public_figures_godwin.article
In a now-famous opinion by Justice William Brennan, the Court held that
libel law, as applied by the courts of Alabama, conflicted with the First
Amendment guarantee of freedom of the press. What, then, should the
standards of libel law be? Justice Brennan first noted that "we consider
this case against the background of a profound national commitment to the
principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and
wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes
unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials." He could
easily have been describing Usenet in 1994.
Brennan went on to write that "erroneous statement is inevitable in free
debate" (reporters and editors are only human, after all), and that
therefore libel law must accommodate a certain amount of falsehood "if the
freedoms of expression are to have the 'breathing space'" that they need
to survive. Since discussion of public officials and their work is central
to democratic debate, he reasoned, it follows that we should make special
allowances for debate about such officials. A public official can win a
libel lawsuit under the First Amendment, wrote Brennan, only if he or she
can prove "actual malice" on the part of the defendant, where proof of
"actual malice" is defined as proof that the statement was made with
"knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was
false or not." (In other words, the term "actual malice" is defined quite
differently from the older term "malice" mentioned above.)
This rule about public officials was later extended to public figures in
general--the Court recognized that sometimes news stories about highly
public individuals is central to democracy even when the individual
doesn't happen to be a public official.
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