Georgia, & Campaign '08 including Obama's response to Corsi

Here’s Mike Williams letter today. The whole thing is first-rate right down to the “teensy little detail” Mike mentions at the end.

Mike begins - - -

Ed Morrissey has the dope on the latest truce agreement between Russia and Georgia (which Secretary of State Rice sponsored) here. It replaces what Ed calls “the Sarkozy cease-fire, which turned out to be little more than a surrender foisted on [Georgia President] Saakashvili.”

Over at American Thinker, Patrick Casey believes the backlash against Russia has already begun:

As Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said yesterday in his press conference (video can be found here, transcript can be found here), Russia's actions in Georgia will result in our allies, especially those in the Russian power sphere that Putin is trying to re-establish, quickly moving towards closer relations with us on all levels, including militarily.

The first manifestation of that occurred last night. USA Today reported that Poland has finally agreed to a missile defense compact with the United States, something that Putin furiously opposed….

Victor Davis Hanson elaborates:

We are a little more than a week into the crisis, and already Russia has already gotten itself more than just fights with Georgia—but also issued creepy threats to Poland over missiles, and to the Ukraine over naval bases. Putin has galvanized into panic most of Eastern Europe and the Baltic states, prompted a radical change of policy in the United States, and embarrassed its once sure support from the appeasement bloc of the European Union. What will next week bring? A Georgian insurgency, replete with stingers, anti-tank guns, and ieds? Increased arms sales to the former republics? Tougher talk from Obama….

You can read about the “creepy threats to Poland” here. As Hanson says, patience. Getting inside Putin’s gambit, maneuvering him into “unforced” errors, and then putting the hammer down on things like Russia’s membership in the G-8 will pay dividends in the long run.

In Campaign 2008 news, Jerome Corsi has a new book out -- The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality. You may remember Corsi as co-author of Unfit for Command, which was also a NYT best-seller. Professor Ann Althouse discusses The Obama Nation here.

Meanwhile, Obama’s local MSM enabler, The N&O, is decidedly worried:

It makes sense for Sen. Barack Obama to slug it out with Jerome Corsi, whose new book paints the presumptive Democratic nominee as a dangerous radical, analysts said Friday.

But Obama's strategy also carries some risks.

"The old saying is that when you get in the gutter, everybody gets dirty," said Kevin Wagner, an assistant professor of political science at Florida Atlantic University, particularly with information flying across the Internet….

What The N&O neglects to tell its readers is that some charges in Unfit for Command were demonstrably true (e.g., Christmas in Cambodia), and that John Kerry never did the one thing completely within his power to lay to rest the less clear-cut allegations – release all his military records to the public as he promised he would.

So Obama’s got real problems here. His long associations with Jeremiah Wright and unrepentant Weather Undergrounders Bernadine Dhorn and William Ayers, plus his wife Michelle’s well-documented America-bashing, demand a solidly factual rebuttal that – just like John Kerry before him – he probably can’t or won’t deliver.

Let’s give Jeff Emanuel at RedState the last word for today:

As my friend and colleague Streiff detailed Friday morning, the Obama campaign was apparently so spooked by the case Jerome Corsi makes against The One in his book "Obama Nation" that they released a 40 page rebuttal to the work.

Streiff wrote:

Even if everything in Corsi's book is correct, it certainly isn't something that a politician who sees himself as less than a deity, if not The Deity, should concern himself with. His 40-page rebuttal provides a good reminder of the immensely flawed character of Obama, himself, rather than addressing any substantive issue.

That a major newspaper would take up the cudgel on Obama's behalf, especially given its shameful cooperation with various smear books directed against President Bush, indicates that Corsi has found a chink in Obama's carefully crafted persona and if they don't silence Corsi, Obama is finished.

In fact, the Obama Nation was in such a hurry to issue their rebuttal to Corsi's book that they appear to have employed their characteristic bypassing of any detail-or-fact-checking in the process (or, perhaps equally likely, they simply thought reality would shift to match whatever they published in their shoolyard retort-level response to the book).

As Jake Tapper points out:

[T]he Obama campaign got a little greedy in their refutations.

First of all, on the front of the response, is a labeled stamped “Brought to you by Bush/Cheney Attack Machine.”

Corsi has actually called for the impeachment of President Bush. Corsi’s a 9/11 Truther who thinks the Bush administration is covering up what “really” happened at the World Trade Center. It’s not fair to blame this nasty screed on the President.

Never mind that teensy little detail, though. After all, it interferes with the Obamans' Reality™ -- and we all know how desperately they want to believe they control that.