Attack-Dog Days
Hendrik Hertzberg
The New Yorker
The week before the week before this week’s scheduled gathering of the delegates and their media camp followers in Denver, the nominee-presumptive of the Democratic Party did something that is strongly recommended, and ought to be mandatory, for anyone who has just logged a year and a half’s worth of eighteen-hour days travelling in airplanes, making speeches, shaking hands with tens of thousands of strangers, answering numbingly repetitive questions, fending off attacks on everything from his position on insurance mandates to his alleged similarity to Paris Hilton, and trying to remember what it feels like to get a good night’s sleep: Barack Obama went on vacation. He did this in Hawaii, one of the fifty United States of America. Not only is Hawaii amply supplied with beaches, sunshine, hotels, and other features useful to vacationers (tourism is the state’s largest industry); it is also where Obama was born and went to high school, and it is the only place he can visit his eighty-five-year-old grandmother, who still occupies the apartment they shared when she was helping rear him. To summarize, Obama took a break. But he wasn’t given one. “Going off this week to vacation in Hawaii does not make any sense whatsoever,” Cokie Roberts, one of the resident sourpusses on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” complained. “I know his grandmother lives in Hawaii, and I know Hawaii is a state, but it has the look of him going off to some sort of foreign, exotic place. He should be in Myrtle Beach, you know, if he’s going to take a vacation at this time”—birthplace and grandma be damned.
On the other hand, the proposition that Obama vacationed in Hawaii is at least factually true. The same cannot be said for the contents of “The Obama Nation,” by Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D., which, thanks to bulk purchases, has been the No. 1 New York Times best-seller for three weeks. The tired pun of the book’s title is a rare instance of hard-right truth in labelling. On a foundation of small, medium-sized, and extra-large falsehoods, “The Obama Nation” erects a superstructure of innuendo, guilt by (often nonexistent) association, baseless speculation, and sinister-sounding but irrelevant digression. The result is an example of what used to be known, in the glory days of ideologically driven totalitarianism, as the Big Lie—in this case, a fabricated, alternate-universe Barack Obama, who, we are told or invited to infer, is a corrupt, enraged, anti-American, drug-dealing, anti-Israel, pseudo-Christian radical leftist, black militant, plagiarist, and liar, trained as a Muslim and mentored by a menagerie of Marxists, Communists, crypto-Communists, and terrorists.
The fabrications and distortions in “The Obama Nation” have been patiently enumerated and refuted by Media Matters and other watchdog Web sites; “Fight the Smears,” a section of Obama’s site, has a fairly complete compilation. The exercise is an absolutely necessary one, but the point-by-point approach can leave the impression of quibbling over details. The problem for Obama isn’t little lies. It’s the big one.
Corsi won his first dollop of fame four years ago, as the co-author of another best-selling tissue of lies, “Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry.” The moral depravity of that book was matched by its physical slovenliness. It looked as if it had been laid out on a teen-ager’s home computer, it was barely literate, and it was padded with large type, wide margins, and redundant appendixes. The sole raison d’être of its publisher, Regnery, is the promulgation of hard-right politics. “The Obama Nation,” on the other hand, has been published by Threshold Editions, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. It is a professional job, and it has evidently benefitted from professional help. In a typical passage, the harsh taste of poison is artificially sweetened by a dose of solemn, ersatz thoughtfulness:
The New Yorker
The week before the week before this week’s scheduled gathering of the delegates and their media camp followers in Denver, the nominee-presumptive of the Democratic Party did something that is strongly recommended, and ought to be mandatory, for anyone who has just logged a year and a half’s worth of eighteen-hour days travelling in airplanes, making speeches, shaking hands with tens of thousands of strangers, answering numbingly repetitive questions, fending off attacks on everything from his position on insurance mandates to his alleged similarity to Paris Hilton, and trying to remember what it feels like to get a good night’s sleep: Barack Obama went on vacation. He did this in Hawaii, one of the fifty United States of America. Not only is Hawaii amply supplied with beaches, sunshine, hotels, and other features useful to vacationers (tourism is the state’s largest industry); it is also where Obama was born and went to high school, and it is the only place he can visit his eighty-five-year-old grandmother, who still occupies the apartment they shared when she was helping rear him. To summarize, Obama took a break. But he wasn’t given one. “Going off this week to vacation in Hawaii does not make any sense whatsoever,” Cokie Roberts, one of the resident sourpusses on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” complained. “I know his grandmother lives in Hawaii, and I know Hawaii is a state, but it has the look of him going off to some sort of foreign, exotic place. He should be in Myrtle Beach, you know, if he’s going to take a vacation at this time”—birthplace and grandma be damned.
On the other hand, the proposition that Obama vacationed in Hawaii is at least factually true. The same cannot be said for the contents of “The Obama Nation,” by Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D., which, thanks to bulk purchases, has been the No. 1 New York Times best-seller for three weeks. The tired pun of the book’s title is a rare instance of hard-right truth in labelling. On a foundation of small, medium-sized, and extra-large falsehoods, “The Obama Nation” erects a superstructure of innuendo, guilt by (often nonexistent) association, baseless speculation, and sinister-sounding but irrelevant digression. The result is an example of what used to be known, in the glory days of ideologically driven totalitarianism, as the Big Lie—in this case, a fabricated, alternate-universe Barack Obama, who, we are told or invited to infer, is a corrupt, enraged, anti-American, drug-dealing, anti-Israel, pseudo-Christian radical leftist, black militant, plagiarist, and liar, trained as a Muslim and mentored by a menagerie of Marxists, Communists, crypto-Communists, and terrorists.
The fabrications and distortions in “The Obama Nation” have been patiently enumerated and refuted by Media Matters and other watchdog Web sites; “Fight the Smears,” a section of Obama’s site, has a fairly complete compilation. The exercise is an absolutely necessary one, but the point-by-point approach can leave the impression of quibbling over details. The problem for Obama isn’t little lies. It’s the big one.
Corsi won his first dollop of fame four years ago, as the co-author of another best-selling tissue of lies, “Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry.” The moral depravity of that book was matched by its physical slovenliness. It looked as if it had been laid out on a teen-ager’s home computer, it was barely literate, and it was padded with large type, wide margins, and redundant appendixes. The sole raison d’être of its publisher, Regnery, is the promulgation of hard-right politics. “The Obama Nation,” on the other hand, has been published by Threshold Editions, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. It is a professional job, and it has evidently benefitted from professional help. In a typical passage, the harsh taste of poison is artificially sweetened by a dose of solemn, ersatz thoughtfulness:
Our argument is that Obama’s experience with Islam predisposes him to Islam in a way that is reflective of his political associates, his political advisors, and his specific policies regarding the Middle East. This is a very different argument than to claim Obama is a Muslim, something no one can prove one way or the other, except for Obama himself.(Continued here.)
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