Unfit for Publication: Corsi's The Obama Nation filled with falsehoods
Summary: In its preface, Jerome Corsi compares his new book, The Obama Nation, to his 2004 book Unfit for Command. The comparison seems apt: Just as Unfit for Command contains false attacks on Sen. John Kerry's military service, a Media Matters review finds that The Obama Nation similarly contains numerous falsehoods about Sen. Barack Obama.
Media Matters previously documented false and baseless charges Corsi made in Obama Nation about Obama's positions on the Global Poverty Act of 2007 and nuclear weapons. Media Matters also pointed out false statements Corsi made while discussing the book with Fox News host Sean Hannity, concerning Obama's position on abortion and Obama's memoir Dreams From My Father (Crown, 1995).
Below are additional falsehoods from Obama Nation, listed in the order in which they appear in the book:
The divorce Corsi baselessly suggests that Obama's father, Barack Obama Sr., may have divorced his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, "following the prescripts of Islamic sharia law." Corsi's sole source for this statement is a blogger who made the claim in a March 20 post, which featured the false headline, "BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA WAS MUSLIM FOR 31 YEARS" and misstated Obama's mother's name as "Shirley Ann." The blogger Corsi cited, "Majalah Bulanan Kumunitas Indonesia Di Edmonton," provided no substantiation for the claim that "the senior Obama divorced Dunham according to Sharia law."
The endnote for Corsi's claim reads as follows:
The first version, that Stanley Ann Dunham Obama divorced Obama Senior, is the version commonly found. The version that Obama Senior divorced Stanley Ann under sharia law is told in sources such as the following: Majalah Bulanan Kumunitas Indonesia Di Edmonton, "Barack Hussein Obama was Muslim for 31 Years," March 20, 2008, at
http://www.indonesiaedmonton.org/berita/2008/03/20/barack-hussein-obama-was-muslim-for-31-years/.
In the blog post that Corsi cites, the author asserted:
The senior Obama married a fellow student, eighteen-year old Shirley Ann (Anna) Dunham of Witchita, Kansas. Dunham was an anthropology student. Obama Jr. was born on August 4, 1961, in Honolulu.
Two years later, the senior Obama divorced Dunham according to Sharia law and returned to Kenya the same year that Kenyatta took control as the first prime minister of a self-governing Kenya (June 1963).
In Dreams from My Father, Obama quotes his mother stating of Barack Obama Sr., "I divorced him":
"It wasn't your father's fault that he left, you know. I divorced him. When the two of us got married, your grandparents weren't happy with the idea. But they said okay -- they probably couldn't have stopped us anyway, and they eventually came around to the idea that it was the right thing to do. Then Barack's father -- your grandfather Hussein wrote Gramps this long, nasty letter saying that he didn't approve of the marriage. He didn't want the Obama blood sullied by a white woman, he said. Well, you can imagine how Gramps reacted to that. And then there was a problem with your father's first wife ... he had told me they were separated, but it was a village wedding, so there was no legal document that could show a divorce ..."
Corsi falsely claims that Obama does not mention the birth of his half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, during the chapter in Dreams in which he discusses his time living in Indonesia. Corsi writes:
In the midst of the personal drama being played against the background of this Indonesian turmoil, on August 15, 1970, Obama's half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, was born to his mother and stepfather. Obama devotes the entire second chapter of his autobiography to his time in Indonesia, but remarkably, he makes no reference to Maya's birth
.
In fact, on Page 47 of Dreams, in the chapter discussing his time in Indonesia, Obama writes that "my mother and Lolo would remain cordial through the birth of my sister, Maya."
Drug use
Corsi falsely claims that Obama "has yet to answer questions" concerning whether "he stopped using marijuana and cocaine completely in college, or whether his drug use extended into his law school days or beyond." Corsi writes:
Still, Obama has yet to answer questions whether he ever dealt drugs, or if he stopped using marijuana and cocaine completely in college, or whether his drug usage extended into his law school days or beyond. Did Obama ever use drugs in his days as a community organizer in Chicago, or when he was a state senator from Illinois? How about in the U.S. Senate? If Obama quit using drugs, the public inquiry certain to occur in a general election campaign for the presidency will most certainly aim at the when, how and why questions George W. Bush successfully avoided .
In fact, Obama wrote in Dreams that he "stopped getting high" shortly after moving to New York City to attend Columbia University as an undergraduate. From Dreams:
When Sadik lost his own lease, we moved in together. And after a few months of closer scrutiny, he began to realize that the city had indeed had an effect on me, although not the one he'd expected. I stopped getting high. I ran three miles a day and fasted on Sundays. For the first time in years, I applied myself to my studies and started keeping a journal of daily reflections and very bad poetry. Whenever Sadik tried to talk me into hitting a bar, I'd beg off with some tepid excuse, too much work or not enough cash
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http://mediamatters.org/items/200808040005?f=h_top
21min Larry King Video link
http://mediamatters.org/embed/larryking-20080813-corsi
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