Friday, August 15, 2008

Obama Nation: a work of fiction

Obama Nation hit the bookstores as a bestseller . . . or did it. It appears that the deceptions of this book do not end with the bibliography. This book made the bestseller list due to huge bulk orders and strategically placed purchases it is these forces that are behind the book's supposed success.

Mr. Corsi, how many copies of your own book did you buy? 1,000? 10,000? More? The right wing machine bought up huge numbers of this piece of kindling to attempt to lend it credibility and to get Corsi on the talk show circuit. According to Mary Matalin, the book's publisher, it is a piece of scholarly work and would neither deny or confirm that there was any fact checking at all for this book. Which I take to mean - no fact checking. Media matters has gone through the book and done an excellent job of exposing the lies in his book. These lies which range from accusing him of being a Muslim to continued drug use and other ridiculous assertions. There are too many falsehoods in this book to comment on them all but Corsi, like so many conservatives, conflates the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq and uses this conflation to suggest that Obama wants to start pulling out of Afghanistan. This can't be further from the truth. Obama not only has repeatedly called for removing troops from Iraq and sending them to Afghanistan but actually introduced a bill in 2007 saying just that. I personally don't think that either war was or wise to get involved in but Obama has not said any of the things Corsi accuses him of.

As someone with a graduate degree in history and has spent countless hours reading actual scholarly works, the excerpts I read do not measure up to even a poor scholarly work. What really makes Corsi's work a piece of garbage is that he admits that the purpose of this book was to discredit Barak Obama. It's one thing to reach these conclusions after doing objective research it is quite another to reach this conclusion and search and/or make up facts to support a predetermined outcome.

This piece of fiction would not even be worth covering except for the fact that Faux News and the like put this guy on and let him spew this nonsense without challenging any of the facts. I am sure a lot of people will read this book and believe what it has to say because it is on the bestseller list and because they see this guy on TV. However, if you want to read some fiction there are a lot more entertaining reads out there. I don't know what it is about this smear machine that has cropped up but the but they certainly do not seem to be deterred by annoying things like the facts. There are plenty of good ideological critiques that can be made of Obama from a conservative point of view but Obama Nation is not one of them. It seems to be effective to repeat a lie so many times that it becomes accepted as fact - Corsi and the Swiftboat Liars did it in 2004 and Corsi is at it again. It's the same mouth-breathing mentality that Faux News is guilty of every time they show a picture of Osama Bin Laden and have an "Obama" caption under it. They think they are being cute but they are being stupid and making America more stupid at the same time. I have a question for those that actually buy and read this book - why?

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