Fred Hiatt: Picking the Easy Target in Jerome Corsi

Fred Hiatt is almost always a day late and a dollar short, it seems. I suppose I should be relieved that he's willing to lambaste former Swiftboater Jerome Corsi for his new book, "Obama Nation," a hit job on Obama that has only occasional and coincidental resemblance to the truth; that was more than we were able to expect from the press four years ago.

The thing is, there will always be political hit-jobbers like Corsi. Sure, the MSM should knock them down if they get enough attention to warrant a response. But the real problem is the semi-credible people who are able and willing to give the Jerome Corsis of this world a platform.

The NY Times says "The book is being pushed along by...a broad marketing campaign that has already included 100 author interviews with talk radio hosts across the country, like Sean Hannity and G. Gordon Liddy, Mr. Corsi said on Tuesday." Could Hiatt have slammed Hannity (who aired Corsi three times) and the other bozos who've put Corsi on their shows, and treated him as if he were a legitimate writer and researcher?

And finally, there's Corsi's publisher, Mary Matalin, a Villager in good standing. Hiatt:

Mary Matalin, the Republican political strategist who heads Threshold Editions, the Simon & Schuster division that published "The Obama Nation," described the book to the New York Times as "a piece of scholarship, and a good one at that." That would not be our description.

Instead of the milquetoast "That would not be our description," how about, "Matalin has lost any shred of credibility she might have once had by publishing this totally unsubstantiated hit job, and maintaining in the face of all evidence that it has any resemblance to scholarship."

Yeah. That might have been a wee tad more like it.