The author of "Obamanation" is Jerome Corsi, the same Corsi who ghost-wrote "Unfit for Command", the Republican smearbook that torpedoed John Kerry in 2004. Right on schedule, the RNC has commissioned Corsi to write this year's definitive Republican smearbible, and the RightWing media are dutifully yet eagerly broadcasting its lies far and wide.

Everybody was blindsided by the tactic in 2004. But in 2008 a lot of people are ready and waiting for the smears, and ready to jump on them as soon as the RNC starts circulating them. The volunteers at stopthesmears.com (part of the Obama campaign) have put together a 40 page analysis debunking the lies in "Obamanation", and for bonus points, taking aim at Corsi and his history of whackjob assertions--he's a 9/11 "Truther", believes that Bush is trying to combine the US with Mexico and Canada to create a "North American Union", has made numerous bigoted statements about Catholicism and Islam, and on and on. The guy's a real piece of work...and now he's the standard-bearer for the Republican smear campaign against Barack Obama.

I'll let the 40-page analysis carry the burden of scraping off the slime; I don't want to get any more on me than I got just by reading its quotes.

It seems to have upset my Conservative colleagues here at the Zone when, in the past, I've shone a light on Republican smear campaigns, as if it's somehow unfair of me to do so. There's an implication that in the interests of "fairness" I'm also supposed to go out and find as many smears in the opposite direction to provide some sort of spurious "balance".

I disagree, with all due respect. It's not my job, and it would be improper to try, since if I did, I'd inevitably be accused of not trying hard enough or injecting bias in my search for countervailing examples. The only people who can properly respond to attempts to smear the Right are Rightwingers, and I invite and encourage you to do so. Post each such smear and rebut it, so that we can all see the broader picture of how this campaign is being conducted.

Besides, there's an asymmetry here: I'm being bombarded by those Republican smears, through multiple channels ranging from private email to public media; they can't be avoided by anybody paying attention to politics. Yet I don't see anything like that happening with smears against McCain. I think that, under these circumstances, demands for "balance" are really just an obfuscating tactic. There's no law of nature, like some sort of Newton's law of political action and reaction, that guarantees that there must be an equal amount of smearing going on at any given time. Based on what I observe, I think that Republicans are far more guilty of smearing and other negative campaigning than Democrats, and I challenge Republicans to prove me wrong.

Along the way, doing some background research about Corsi, I came across this gem of a blog comment on Freeper, by another RightWinger. Not directly related to the book, although it was a thread about Corsi; but kinda fun in its own right:

I use to love Google 10 years ago. But they have slowly corporized and moved into promoting liberal theology. Getting hard to find information is much more difficult as you niw have to weed through people selling products and liberal sites. It used to be you could use a few strategically selected key words and get right to the information you wanted, no matter how obscure. Not anymore.

Yep, the secret's out, Google's a key part of the Vast Liberal Conspiracy, and using its status as a powerhouse of free-market capitalism to kill the goose that laid Google's golden egg.

But how does Google know which sites are Liberal? Well, now that it's out, I may as well tell you: All us Liberal WebMasters get a special code to put in the robots.txt file that search spiders check before entering a site. The code identifies our sites as fellow travelers, and Google bumps them up to the top of the search results, thereby creating the illusion that we live in a Liberal world. Yeah, that's it!

How many logical flaws you can find in that RightWinger's paranoia? Five sentences that sum up the worldview of the RightWing extremist...go for it!