Jerome Corsi takes 364 pages, with footnotes, to tell Americans that Barack Obama is a dangerously radical leftist who has internalized a "black rage."
The Obama campaign has taken 40 pages to reply, calling Corsi "a discredited liar who is peddling another piece of garbage in order to continue the Bush-Cheney politics he helped perpetuate four years ago."
Corsi's Obama Nation is a bestseller. The Obama campaign's Unfit for Publication is a history lesson learned.
It was four years ago that Corsi co-authored Unfit For Command, the tale of Swift Boat veterans who successfully discredited Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry's military service in Vietnam.
In August 2004, Kerry initially left the accusations unchallenged, a fatal mistake.
Fuelled by media attention and Kerry silence, the phenomenon of Swift Boating was born.
Corsi – who has also written about the secret George W. Bush plan to merge Canada, the United States and Mexico; argued that a NAFTA superhighway contributed to last year's bridge collapse in Minnesota; and believes the U.S. government covered up its role in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks – is back.
But Obama is responding.
So is Kerry, who, perhaps four years too late, has created a website to debunk the smears. He is also defending Obama.
Dermot McEvoy of Publishers Weekly, coined a new phrase last week, calling the phenomenon "Swift Booking."
The Corsi book rocketed to the top of bestsellers lists, helped by conservative organizations that buy such books in bulk, then sell them at cut-rate prices, giving the illusion of such popularity that the mainstream media must write about them.
McEvoy also believes conservatives are more likely than liberals to read books that reaffirm their core values.
"Maybe if conservatives keep reading what they believe, maybe they think it might come true," he joked.
"Now that was mean, wasn't it?"
