The case against Jerome Corsi

Peter Wehner, a former member of the Bush administration’s Office of Strategic Initiatives, makes the case against Corsi:




The Obama Smears
PETER WEHNER - 08.15.2008 - 9:27 AM

There has been a lot of attention given in the last few days to Jerome Corsi’s new book, The Obama Nation, which will debut at #1 on the New York Times best-seller list. It seems pretty clear, I think, that conservatives should not hitch their hopes to it.

Corsi himself, based on press accounts, is a leading advocate of the North American Union conspiracy. The NAU, for those who believe in it, is, according to a Boston Globe story, “a supranational organization that will soon fuse Canada, the United States, and Mexico into a single economic and political unit.” In an interview, Corsi said he believes in the existence of the NAU because, according to Corsi, President Bush was not securing the Southern border.

According to reports, Corsi has suggested that Hillary Rodham Clinton is a lesbian, called John Kerry “anti-Christian, anti-American” and called Pope John Paul II “senile,” and said pedophilia “is OK with the Pope as long as it isn’t reported by the liberal press.”

As for the book: it seems to be riddled with factual errors–some relatively minor (like asserting that Obama does not mention the birth of his half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, in Dreams from My Father; Obama does mention her), and some significant (suggesting that Obama favors withdrawing troops from Afghanistan; he wants to do the opposite). But more problematic, I think, is Corsi’s claim that Obama has “extensive connections to Islam” and his suggestion that Obama is a recent drug user. Those claims are, from everything I can tell, unsubstantiated. (When challenged to produce the evidence, Corsi counters with the “prove you’re not beating your wife” defense.)

For example, Obama, who in his book admitted using drugs in his youth, says he hasn’t used any since he was 20 years old. Corsi, in an interview, said Obama’s words can’t be trusted because “self-reporting, by people who have used drugs, as to when they stopped is inherently unreliable.” And Corsi’s effort to tie Obama to the Muslim faith–claims based on questionable sources, reaching back to Obama’s youth in Indonesia–is especially troubling, since the subtext here is attaching Obama to militant Islam and suggesting that he’s somehow alien to America and its values (when in fact his candidacy is a confirmation of the viability of those values).

Corsi’s approach to politics is both destructive and self-destructive. If Senator Obama loses, he should lose on the merits: his record in public life and his political philosophy. And while it’s legitimate to take into account Obama’s past associations with people like the Reverend Jeremiah Wright–especially for someone like Obama, about whom relatively little is known–it wrong and reckless to throw out unsubstantiated charges and smears against Senator Obama.

Conservatism has been an intellectual home to people like Burke and Buckley. The GOP is the party that gave us Lincoln and Reagan. It seems to me that its leaders ought to make it clear that they find what Dr. Corsi is doing to be both wrong and repellent. To have their movement and their party associated with such a figure would be a terrible thing and it will only help the cause of those who hold both the GOP and the conservative movement in contempt.