Jerome Corsi Is A Kook Part II- Conservatives Policing Our Own

Last week I sort of responded to the demand that conservatives must hold Corsi accountable on some things at Yes Jerome Corsi Is a Kook . I have watched how several Conservative people of note go to some length to say that Corsi is at times fact challenged while also pointing out what is true in his latest book about Obama. I am glad to see that many conservatioves and Republicans have not leapt to the Corsi defense. So we have the best of both worlds.

I think Douthat over at the Atlantic gets it and it represents some of what we are seeing on the web

I'm not big on ritual denunciations: I'd rather argue with people than read them out of the conversation, as a general rule, and I hope my distaste for certain styles of political discourse is clear enough without my having to publicly denounce Ann Coulter every time she pulls an offensive, sales-goosing stunt on live TV. But along with Jon Henke and Pete Wehner, I think it's worth making an exception in the case of Jerome Corsi's anti-Obama book, whose Amazon page won't be linked here. It isn't just that Corsi himself is a conspiracy theorist and a crank, or that his best-selling farrago of innuendo and outright smears exemplifies everything that's wrong with a certain sort of right-wing publishing, or that David Freddoso's The Case Against Barack Obama demonstrates that it's perfectly possible to write an anti-Obama book without descending into the fever swamps. It's that this is an election where conservatives need to be very, very conscious about the importance of line-drawing: If the Right is going to resist the ongoing attempts by Obamaphiles to define various sorts of normal political elbow-throwing (cutting ads making fun of Barack Obama's political style, calling attention to the controversial public utterances of Michelle Obama and Jeremiah Wright, etc.) as inherently racist and hatemongering, conservatives need to be very clear about where the line actually is, and what sort of attacks are actually beyond the pale and worth condemning.

He goes on to talk about his more liberal counterpart (or whatever political alignment he is this morning) Andrew Sullivan is not doing it on his side.

Conservatives and Republican need to do this. The immigration debate was not our finest hour of policing our own. EVEN MANY HARDLINERS on the issue recognized it. A couple of years back conservatives that had views from pro- comp reform(such as I) to deport all the illegals big and small united to do this on that stupid Mnuteman fence project. We showed for instance not only were some of these people perhaps ethically challenged( people that were trying to the be the public voice of conservatism) but the whole thing was one huge financial scam!!! If you note many conservative blogs and sites do not have the Minuteman Fence projects buttons and links anymore. They are sort of silently went away for the most. Though some of the larger Conservative bloggers that promoted that project non stop did not have the guts to say they got bamboozled despite many of them calling us every name in the book for wanting to expose thisonsense

I could go on. Needless to say some of the stuff was over the top. For instance I quit reading NEWSMAX after they had a headline ILLEGAL ALIEN RAPES PUPPY. Seeing the 1000th picture of McCain in Mexican Headgear I suspect became very non funny to Hispanic and Latino Americans quickly. The result was we got slaughtered in the Hispanic vote after a full year of nonsense we should have stopped.

Liberals do the same thing when they talk about people of faith. They have no clue or attempt to think that all this talk of Jesusland and theocrats that want to make the nation a Christian version of Iran is extremely insulting. Conservatives can be just as stupid.

Corsi represent this factions of lets bilk Conservatives and Republicans out of a buck group to me that we need to start to sort of ignoring.