In early 2007, Corsi huddled with an old friend, Howard Phillips, a veteran conservative operative who had attempted to organize the anti-government militia movement into a cohesive political bloc during the 1990s. Corsi emerged from their discussion convinced of his destiny. He would declare his campaign for the presidential nomination of the ultra-right Constitution Party, enthusiastically embrace the party's call for a complete halt on immigration, banning abortion even in cases of rape and incest, and upholding its official platform that the "US Constitution established a Republic under God, rather than a democracy." With this momentous announcement, Corsi hoped to cast himself as the last, best hope to save America from the godless, globalist duocracy conspiring to merge the United States, Mexico and Canada into a "North American Union." (His latest flop, published in 2007, was a screed entitled, The Late Great USA: The Coming Merger with Mexico and Canada.)

In July 2007, Corsi spoke before the Texas Constitution Party. At the time, he remained focused on foiling the ambitions of Hillary and Bill Clinton. "I don't want Bill Clinton anywhere near the White House," Corsi proclaimed. "We had enough serial rape going on when he was President." But Corsi didn't want a Republican in the White House either, especially not Senator John McCain. The war-scarred McCain, Corsi wrote in a column for the far-right webzine WorldNetDaily, is a possible jihadist dupe who "has enjoyed strong support from a lobbying group that backs...a Muslim terrorist group with ties to criminal drug networks and Al Qaeda." Even George W. Bush was now treasonous. "Bush," he told the Texas Constitution Party, "is post-America and post-God," a figure so indebted to foreign interests that he had allowed "communist China" to "run its gunboats up the Mississippi." In Corsi's mind, both parties were fronts for the money-masters, the Trilateralists, the plotters of Bohemian Grove--the "elitists who want to destroy the nation-state."

"They don't want to offend anybody. They don't want to offend Mexico. They don't want to offend God," he railed, accidentally inverting what he meant to say. "They take God out of my money. I think we ought to offend Mexico! I think we ought to offend the sexual abusers! I think we ought to respect God."

Corsi's audience went wild with applause, cheering almost as loudly as they did when he recounted a self-congratulatory tale of hanging up on a telemarketer because he was from India. Despite the mounting enthusiasm for his candidacy, Corsi unaccountably withdrew from the race just days after his Texas address. He promptly endorsed Chuck Baldwin, a theocratic Baptist pastor who had left the Republican Party in 2000 to protest what he viewed as Bush's extreme liberalism. Bush, according to Baldwin, was "in bed with homosexuals" (or "sodomites" as he likes to call them) and had gone soft on abortion providers, whom Baldwin believed should be marched en masse to the gallows.

"Chuck [Baldwin], I know personally. He's a man of God," Corsi told the Constitution Party's national convention in May. "He believes in the Constitution and he believes in the United States of America."

It could be that rather than running for president, he could reprise
his earlier role as a poisoner of presidential politics.

He punched out a proposal for an anti-Obama attack book, Obama Nation, and floated it to right-wing publishers. Mary Matalin, the longtime Republican consultant and former senior adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, was hunting for titles for her two-year-old publishing imprint, Threshold, a conservative division of Simon and Schuster. When Corsi's proposal landed on her desk, she was thrilled.

Matalin promptly signed Corsi to a lucrative deal, positioning Obama Nation as Threshold's premier release of the summer season. In anticipation of heavy sales, Matalin ordered the printing of 475,000 copies. When the book was released in early August, conservative foundations and think tanks ensured its early success with a massive bulk buy, propelling it to number one on the New York Times bestseller list.

Read the whole story here.

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