Corsi's confabulation

Jerome Corsi, the author of the anti-Kerry book Unfit for Command, has written another book attacking Obama entitled Obama Nation, the title being a fairly unimaginative pun describing what he thinks an Obama presidency would be. (Lest anyone be confused, he explains the origins of this turn of phrase to you.)

But this book isn't anything like its predecessor. Nope. We know this because Corsi says so in his preface (reprinted on the New York Times website):

Any implication that this book is a “Swift Boat” book is not accurate in that John O’Neill and the other members of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth have had nothing to do with this book, its analysis and arguments, or my opposition to Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.

It's just "Swift Boat"-like.

As I thought about the appearance of Corsi's book, which I will never read, I thought about the problem of what philosopher Sissela Bok calls confabulations, stories where truth and lies are so closely interwoven that no one can tell the difference between the two.

In the case of Corsi's confabulation, he finds the hidden prejudices of his target audience (which, admittedly, aren't hard to spot) and then dumps so many disembodied "facts" on those prejudices that it's impossible for anyone to fact-check what he says. Of course, Corsi, whose academic pedigree is prominently displayed on the title, postures as if he is producing real research. "My intent in writing this book," he says, "is to fully document all arguments and contentions I make, extensively footnoting all references, so readers can determine for themselves the truth and validity of the factual claims." Yet, as with Unfit for Command, his narrative is full of cherry-picked quotations, innuendos, and bold-face lies.

Even so, the power of his story comes not from the fact that it "hangs together" (what rhetorical scholar Walter Fisher calls narrative coherence) under scrutiny, but from the fact that it coheres just enough that it plays into the biases the audience already brings to the text. For these folks, who are already pretty much convinced that Obama is a radical leftist and probably an Islamist Manchurian candidate to boot, Corsi's book will mysteriously "ring true" (the quality of narrative that Fisher describes as narrative fidelity). And therein lies its power.

From a public relations perspective, the problem with confabulations like this, whether they are called Unfit for Command or The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, is that they are the mutant viruses of public discourse. Once they are out in the public conversation—and especially when they are put in print in a best-selling book—they are often there to stay. You may be able to defeat them, but they will always come back in a different form. Obama's team is much more proactive than Kerry's was, but it's unclear how effective they will be.