Bad Penny

Watch Media Matters' Paul Waldman decimate author liar Jerome Corsi:

Jeffery Feldman usefully reminds us that Corsi was basically an accessory to a crime:

The Swift Boat group did more than just lie about John Kerry in a book. They broke Federal Election laws, were found guilty, and paid a huge fine.

"I've written eight books since 2004": I love that he considers this a selling point.

Dig especially the bit seventeen minutes in on former Cheney aide and longtime GOP operative Mary Matalin's role in the book: "Once Mr. Corsi's book came out it fit right in to the conservative promotion machine. That means he gets to go on Fox News as many times as he wants. He gets bought in bulk by conservative donors. It gets sent out, promoted on conservative mailing lists. This is something they've done very well before, and the merit of the book in question is never even in question. You know, one of the other "best-sellers" that they managed to push onto the best-seller list...was something that alleged that Hillary Clinton put crack pipes on the White House Christmas tree."

Like so many of the right's most enduring cons, this one started with Nixon. From NIXONLAND:

The President asked Chuck Colson if he'd read the new book The News Twisters by Edith Efron, an employee of one of his biggest backers, publisher Walter Annenberg. Colson replied that he had, and found it a waste of time.

Wrong answer.

The News Twisters purported to be an objective study proving the networks followed "the elitist-liberal-left line in all controversies," "actively slanting" against the "white middle-class majority"--80 percent to 20, Efron concluded. To make the case, she videotaped hundreds of hours of broadcasts about the 1968 presidential election, marking each utterance for the side she took it to favor. Her judgments proved rather idiosyncratic. In heads-I-win-tails-you-lose fashion, footage of Humphrey being heckled by anti-war protesters was scored as "supports demonstrators"; footage depicting Humphrey excoriating Rap Brown and Stokeley Carmichael and "extremists of the left and the right" was scored as "anti-conservative," too. A CBS report that Nixon was "warning his staff against overconfidence, but he himself hardly looks worried" was scored as suggesting Nixon "is a liar."

This, the President concluded, was literature. Nixon ordered Colson to get it on the best seller list. Availing himself of $8000 from the same funds that bought their gear for the Fielding break-in, Colson bought out bookstores' stock. Cartons of The News Twisters piled up in Howard Hunt's office--as it appeared on the best-seller lists beside LBJ's memoirs, B.F. Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity, The Last Whole Earth Catalog, and the sex manual Any Woman Can!

Why not? The Kennedys were worse. Joe Kennedy had gotten his kid Jack's college thesis cleaned up and published as a book, and schemed to get his ghost-written Profiles in Courage a Pulitzer. "They're using any means," Nixon told Colson and Haldeman. "We are going to use any means. Is that clear?"

By coincidence, the day before Paul's blockbuster performance on Larry King, I wondered what happened to such books after their 15 nanoseconds passed. Now, anyone who buys a lot of used books knows that from time to time a worthy used volume shows up on Amazon for as low as a penny (which was how I picked up this one).

What is fascinating about the Regnery Smear-of-the-Month Club selections is that they all go for a penny.

• Ann Coulter's SLANDER (you can pick up pristine new copies for a low, low $1.39) and TREASON (this last is my favorite of the Coulter oeuvre,, because I'm listed as one of the traitors; check the index for "Perlstein, Rick," right before "Philby, Kim").

• New copies ofTHE SAVAGE NATION go for a penny.

• The book about the crack pipes on the White House Christmas tree, perhaps because it's such a camp classic, is an outlier; it will set you back forty-one cents.

• And on and on. Free subscription to The Big Con to the reader who finds the most recent conservative book that "made" the best-seller list but is now purchasable for a penny.

P.S.: Wanna make Jerome Corsi cry? Make this a bestseller. This too.

P.P.S.: Nedra Pickler of the AP gives the author his due:

Corsi writes for World Net Daily, a conservative Web site whose lead headline Thursday was "Astonishing photo claims: Dead Bigfoot stored on ice."