Reality Bites Corsi on the Ass

You may remember Jerome Corsi, although if you do, you most likely wish you could forget.

He's the right-wing smear artist who makes the National Enquirer look like a careful, sober journalistic organization. He spewed forth Unfit for Command, a collection of lies, smears, and bullshit aimed at assassinating John Kerry's heroic Vietnam service. And he's been trying to pull the same filthy stunts with collections of lies, smears and total bullshit about Obama.

His latest book, The Obama Nation (and if you don't get the intentional pun in that title, read it again fast), is intended to feed the flames of racial and religious fear about Obama. A large part of that is in trying to paint him as some foreign devil come to destroy America. It contains paranoid ramblings such as this:

In the promotional literature for his book, Dr Corsi promised to reveal sinister links between Kenyan politicians and Mr Obama.

"Dr Corsi will also expose details of deep secret ties between US Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and a section of Kenya government leaders, their connection to certain sectoral groups in Kenya and subsequent plot to be executed in Kenya should Senator Obama win the American presidency," it said.

Now. If you'd just slandered an entire country, where Obama is enormously popular, would you be stupid enough to go parading around waving this toxic crap? Corsi is. And he's learned that, while you can get away with outrageous shit in America as an American citizen, it's a little tougher to pull off the same outrageous shit in Kenya as an American citizen:

A leading American neo-conservative author has been detained by immigration authorities in Kenya as he tried to launch a book smearing Barack Obama.

Jerome Corsi, of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth fame, was this morning being held after failing to reckon with Obamamania.

He had been planning to launch his book, entitled The Obama Nation Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality, before travelling to one of Nairobi’s slums to donate money to the Senator’s half-brother George, who was found living in squalid conditions two months ago.

[snip]

Immigration officials claim he had been detained because he did not have a work permit, however one of Dr Corsi's assistants said he was "just answering some questions".

I'm sure they're not questions like, "Were you really stupid enough to think you'd be welcome here?" and "If you're such an amazing researcher, why didn't you research Kenya enough to learn that it could use its laws to make your life miserable?" and "You've made an assload of money off these 'books' of yours, so why were you only planning to give George $1000? We know that donation was a stunt, but did it really have to be such a cheap stunt?" But that's probably the subtext.

Let this be a lesson to smear artists everywhere: if you insult a country without the same scruples against political arrests as many of the Western democracies, you'd best not go on a book tour there. Just sayin'.