Raila dragged into attack on Obama

Unfit for Command took specific aim at Senator Kerry’s decorated service during the Vietnam war on a US Navy “swift boat”.

The Obama Nation shows clearly that Mr Corsi is now seeking to “swift-boat” the African-American senator who is set to be formally nominated later this month as the Democratic Party’s 2008 presidential candidate.

The book distorts Senator Obama’s political views and associations – often by means of inaccuracies – in an attempt to destroy his image as a new-style politician able to bridge cultural, racial and ideological divides.

Senator Kerry lashed back at Unfit for Command, but his campaign’s response was considered slow and inadequate. Senator Obama’s camp, by contrast, launched a full-scale counterattack on The Obama Nation within a couple of days of the book’s appearance in shops throughout the US.

Detailed refutations of many of the claims in the book are posted on an Internet site sponsored by the senator’s campaign: www.FightTheSmears.com.

Vowing to “respond to these smears forcefully with all the means at our disposal,” Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor declared on Thursday: “Jerome Corsi is a discredited liar who is peddling another piece of garbage to continue the Bush-Cheney politics he helped perpetuate four years ago.”

A recipient of a PhD from Harvard University, Mr Corsi works as a staff reporter for WorldNetDaily.com, a right-wing website that circulates conspiracy theories and outlandish reports involving monsters and end-of-the-world prophecies.

Mr Corsi says early in The Obama Nation that Kenya will play a key part in his “account because “Barack Obama himself tells us that Kenya is an important part of who he is, even today.” The book offers a series of “questions” based on the Senator’s alleged links to Mr Odinga.

It asks, for example: “If Obama were to be involved in Kenyan politics as US president, would his political goal simply be to stop violence, such as that which erupted after the recent election?

"Or would Obama seek to advance the same policy goals that his tribesman Odinga has in his co-presidency with Kibaki?”

Near the book’s close, Mr Corsi asks Americans to consider: “If Obama continues to support Odinga as Prime Minister, is he therefore accepting or condoning the post-election violence that brought Odinga to power, and a radical agenda from the left that would expand Islam in Kenya?”

The book’s first chapter focuses on Obama Snr because, Mr Corsi explains, “Barack Obama introduced himself to the American public with a book about his father.”

That 1995 autobiography was entitled Dreams from My Father, so Mr Corsi entitles this chapter “Myths from His Father.”

Mr Corsi argues in The Obama Nation that the senator downplayed or tried to hide his father’s alcoholism and polygamy in the 1995 book.

In response, the FightTheSmears.com website cites page numbers in Dreams from My Father in which those issues are discussed.