I was encouraged this week to see how the Obama campaign—unlike John Kerry’s in ’04—aggressively took the fight to shameless horseshit vendor Jerome Corsi, Ph. D (co-author of the Swift Boat text “Unfit For Command”), and his current hit piece titled “Obama Nation” published by a division of Simon & Shuster headed by former Cheney staffer Mary Matalin.
In response, sites like Media Matters have aggressively fact-checked Corsi’s text (#1 this week on the New York Times best-seller list, largely due to bulk purchases from conservative groups that artificially inflate sales figures) along with other sources which have exposed factual errors and lazy research methods in “Obama Nation.”
Plus, the Obama campaign has also produced a fully-cited, 40-page refutation of “Obama Nation” taking its analysis (which insinuates, among other things, that Obama is a drug-user and a closet Muslim) down piece by piece – retorts which Corsi and his hack editors have yet to refute.
Finally, a little piece of advice for readers in general: you may notice that a lot of conservative authors (like Corsi and Ann Coulter) like to bulk up their books with footnotes--used as side comments listing sources for a prior statement—the implication being that they show how diligent a writer has been in bolstering their work with hard research.
However, there’s a catch here: being that if (like Corsi and Coulter) your research methods are crap—or worse, farmed out to editorial underlings working for the author—footnotes are nothing more than empty, meaningless noise.
Just a tip, by the bye.
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