Jerome R. Corsi is clearly a scum bag. He was that when he went after John F. Kerry in 2004, then as co-author of Unfit for Command, a shoddy and shabby attack on the war hero's record in the Vietnam war. Frankly, I couldn't actually finish the book, so desperate was it to prove allegations that were patently untrue. It was a cut and paste, invent and infer job. Vicious, really. And T. Boone Pickens, who now is financing a progressive campaign for wind power (and presumably also for his own financial interests) and who also backed much of the Swift Boat mischief during the last presidential race, should be ashamed of himself.
I've seen no indication that Pickens is involved this time around in the anti-Obama swill. But Corsi is, with his book Obama Nation being the crude instrument of attack. Now, I haven't even looked at this book. But others have bought it, many others. So many that its first Sunday on the Times book review best-seller list this weekend will have it in first place, according to a dispatch by Foon Rhee in Thursday's Globe. I am more than sure that this volume, which its author claims as a scholarly study, is rank crap. Obama is a Muslim terrorist with ties to the Black Panther Party to which he was introduced by his wife who studied revolutionary theory at Princeton after which he captured the prime slot of the American legal establishment, the editorship of the Harvard Law Review, and found himself in the classes of Alan Dershowitz...Oops, the story is not going right.
Both the Times and the Globe reported that Kerry has initiated a defense (or maybe it's an offense) against his tormentor. Of course, this is also a defense of Obama who, some might argue, shouldn't go into the gutter with such political vermin. It's what I think, too. I guess John Kerry can't resist.
One reason is that he is using Obama's campaign to vindicate his own. But Obama doesn't need that baggage, and frankly it is explosive baggage. It will suggest to voters that Kerry is a prime candidate for secretary of state, for which my senator from Massachusetts thinks himself ideal. Remember: voters, even voters who were desperate about George Bush, did not like their only other option. Not since Mike Dukakis did the Democrats select a candidate about whom they were so indifferent. Or maybe it was George McGovern. In any case, the presidential analogies are now kaput. Although he, too, went to Yale, Kerry is no Dean Acheson.
Obama's victory will be close enough that it shouldn't be loaded down with Kerry's resentments.