welcome negative coverage on Corsi : )-Boston Globe

I SPENT the weekend reading "The Obama Nation," the new book by Jerome R. Corsi - and what a revelation it was!

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Unfortunately for Corsi's, um, scholarly reputation, the last high-profile work he was involved with didn't withstand independent scrutiny. That was "Unfit for Command," the 2004 torpedo that Corsi and John O'Neill aimed at John Kerry. That book and subsequent efforts by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth had the unfortunate effect of making "swift boat" a verb synonymous with "smear."

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So let's consider a little of the work Corsi has done in his efforts to portray Barack Obama as a crypto-radical. Start with Obama's use of the word "change." Now, in politics, a call for change may seem innocuous enough - until, that is, you apply the shrewd interpretive power of Jerome Corsi, Ph.D.

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Perhaps you find it hard to believe that Obama, who declines to call for either a single-payer healthcare system or even an individual mandate for healthcare coverage, is either a radical or a socialist.. . .
And then there's campaign consultant David Axelrod, "born to Jewish parents on New York City's Lower East Side in 1955," whose mother once worked for PM, "a leftist tabloid newspaper" that also employed "communist sympathizers" like I.F. Stone.

In case you're wondering just what that proves, Corsi lays it all out: Axelrod, like Obama himself, has "roots in the leftist political environment of the 1940s, one dominated by literary intellectuals who were comfortable with self-proclaimed communists in their midst."

Students of history may recognize this as in similar vein with the kind of investigatory work once pursued by Senator Joseph McCarthy.

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But perhaps you still suspect it would be hard for the seemingly mild-mannered Obama to disguise the angry radical socialist who supposedly lurks within. Ah, but you see, Obama is a secret smoker. (A longtime smoker who has struggled successfully to quit, Obama's campaign says, but who believes that? After all, wasn't Karl Marx a smoker too?)
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"Scholarship" like this fairly takes your breath away. No doubt Corsi will find a following among confirmed Obama-haters, but for fair-minded readers, his latest effort only proves one thing: Doctoral robes aren't enough to disguise a character assassin.