Politics and personality: in The Obama Nation, author Jerome Corsi offers some devastating critiques of Barack Obama, including his ties to radical leftists and his "cult of personality.".

The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality, by Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D., New York: Threshold Editions, Div. of Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2008, 364 pages, hardcover, $28.00.

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When Jerome Corsi's recent book, The Obama Nation, was released this summer, it began to tarnish Barack Obama's aura of electoral invincibility that had been the dominant media script up until that time. It was the first widely circulated publication to expose the damaging details about Obama's past that Obama's accomplices in the big media knew about, but would not report.

Until this book was published, Obama had been way up in the presidential polls, and his campaign had managed to spin the candidate as a great unifier who transcended race and petty political partisanship. This book started to unmask Obama's "cult of personality," which subsequent events have accelerated.

Author Jerome Corsi states in the introduction that he wrote the book to keep Obama from being elected, but he is not a Republican partisan and doesn't plan to vote for McCain. The play on words in the title was deliberate--"Obama Nation" meant Abomination. Having been at the top of the New York Times best-seller list when it was published this summer, and now sitting in the number two slot, it may contribute to achieving Corsi's goal. Predictably, the corporate media savaged Corsi, but the attacks did not gain much traction or dampen sales.

The Obama campaign was so concerned about its effectiveness that it issued a 40-page rebuttal entitled Unfit for Publication, where it purports to expose Corsi's "lies." It weakly notes a few obvious typographical errors, such as incorrect dates for the Obamas' marriage and when they bought their home, and the wrong section of the city where he lived during a stint of "community organizing."

However, the Obama rebuttal failed to effectively challenge Corsi's most devastating critiques of Obama, including his associations with radical leftists, corrupt money men, hard-boiled Chicago politicians, and venomous racists here and abroad. Nor did it offer reasonable explanations for his intervention on behalf of a leftist Kenyan politician; a questionable house-financing deal with convicted Obama campaign financier Tony Rezko; his longtime attendance at the church of race-baiting Rev. Jeremiah Wright; his sponsorship of the U.N. Global Poverty Act, which would raise world taxes; or his disingenuous campaign statements and ...