Obama accused of being a stealth radical liberal' in new book

New York, Aug.13 : A new book has sought to expose presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee Barack Obama as being nothing but a "stealth radical liberal who has tried to cover up "extensive connections to Islam".

Written by conservative gadfly Jerome R. Corsi, who shot to the top of the best-seller lists as co-author of "Unfit for Command," a book attacking Senator John Kerry's record on a Vietnam War Swift boat, the book says questions whether Obama's admitted experimentation with drugs in high school and college ever ceased.

Significant parts of the book, whose subtitle is "Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality," have already been challenged as misleading or false in the days since its debut on August 1.

Nonetheless, it is to make its first appearance on The New York Times best-seller list for non-fiction hard covers this Sunday - at No. 1.

The book is being pushed along by a large volume of bulk sales, intense voter interest in Obama and 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.

The publisher is Threshold Editions, a division of Simon and Schuster whose chief editor is Mary Matalin, the former Republican operative turned publisher-pundit.

Threshold says it has undertaken an extensive printing effort for anticipated demand, with 475,000 copies of "The Obama Nation" produced so far.

"The goal is to defeat Obama. I don't want Obama to be in office," Corsi said in a telephone interview.

He also said he was planning to aid several conservative groups that intend to run advertisements against Obama this fall, though he would not name them.

Corsi terms his reporting on Obama as "investigative," not prosecutorial.

Books like "Unfit for Command," which remained for some 12 weeks on the Times best-seller list, and, now, "The Obama Nation," have become an effective and favored delivery system for political attacks. There have been anti-Clinton (both Bill and Hillary) and anti-Bush books too numerous to name.

The sensational findings in these books, true or dubious, can quickly come to dominate the larger political discussion in the news media, especially on cable television and the less readily detectible confines of talk radio and partisan Web sites.

Fact-checking the books can require extensive labor and time from independent journalists, whose work often trails behind the media echo chamber.

Web sites on the left have begun poring over Corsi's latest book.

Several of the book's accusations, in fact, have been found to be unsubstantiated, misleading or inaccurate.

ANI