The Middle is Always Evil

I was doing a bit of intellectual slumming earlier tonight, watching Countdown with Keith Olbermann; Rachel Maddow was guest hosting. Initially, I was just going to shut the garbage off, but she previewed a segment on Jerome Corsi’s new book The Obama Nation that would appear later in the program, and since I am currently reading it, I decided to stick around for a bit.

I should have left the room.

I sat uncomfortably through the bizarre first half of the program, which, amid numerous calls for a united Democratic Party, mostly consisted of impugning John McCain for his wealth—very strange.

Finally, the segment I had been waiting for started, featuring Eric Burns, who was presented as a non-partisan “media critic.” I was skeptical. The segment started with Maddow saying flatly the book is full of lies that have all been debunked. “OK,” I said to myself, “if that’s true, Burns should have some solid information for me, and I can throw my copy in the trash.”

What did Burns actually have to say to discredit the book? Here he is:

“Let me… You didn’t ask me this, but I just have to mention this to you… You know, one of the other things that gives a book cachè—a non fiction book—is foot notes; you look at the back of the book and you see all these footnotes, dozens of pages of them, and you say, ‘this guy did a lot of research.’ Well, before the show tonight, and I didn’t have time to do more… but, of the first eleven footnotes in the book, nine of them, in nine of them, Corsi quotes Corsi—in other words, he quotes previous writings of his own. It’s a dubious practice to say the least.”

Wow, I thought. If that’s true, Corsi really must be a truly dishonest journalist. I happened to have the book right beside me at the moment, so I checked out what Burns had said. It was true! Of the first eleven footnotes, nine of them are of Corsi’s own writings. Shocked, I checked the actual text to see what they referred to.

Lo and behold, the citations referred to the preface of the book, which is entitled Who I Am and Why I Wrote This Book. The very first clause of the preface is footnoted, and it is one of the footnotes in question. It reads as follows:

“In 2004, I coauthored Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry.”

The corresponding footnote reads:

John E. O’Neill and Jerome r. Corsi, Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2004).

A dubious practice indeed. Burns made it seem as though Corsi was being dishonest in citing himself, when he clearly was just being thorough.

Eric Burns is a renowned “media critic” with considerable experience. If Corsi’s book is so full of lies, why does a professional such as he have to distort the facts about the book itself in order to prove his case?