Corsi already wrote his silly Obama book, in time for the 2008 elections, but he forgot to make that book about how Obama was secretly born in Kenya, because that particular conspiracy theory had just been invented at the time. So now he’s giving it another go, with “Where’s the Birth Certificate.”

Drudge’s “FLASH” is very, very funny, so I’m just going to reprint it:

BOOK TO REVEAL OBAMA’S ‘TRUE’ IDENTITY?
Wed Apr 20 2011 10:35:52 ET

**Exclusive**

This year’s high stakes publishing project quietly went to press this week, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.

After years of research and digging by the nation’s top private investigators, here it comes:

“WHERE’S THE BIRTH CERTIFICATE? The Case that Barack Obama is not Eligible to be President.”

MORE

The street date is a LONG month away, and author Jerome Corsi, the man who torpedoed John Kerry’s presidential dreams with SWIFT BOAT, has gone underground and is holding his new findings thisclose.

“It’s utterly devastating,” reveals a source close to the publisher. “Obama may learn things he didn’t even know about himself!”

MORE

Does Corsi definitively declare the location of Obama’s birth?

Will the president’s attorneys attempt to interfere with the book’s distribution? [The publisher vows to vigorously fight any legal action that may be taken.]

Will the book finally — once and for all — put an end to the growing controversy?

Or will it just ignite new ones!?

“When Donald Trump said he sent PIs to Hawaii to get to the bottom of all this, he meant this book,” declares an insider.

[THE CASE ranked #1,341 on AMAZON's hitparade late Wednesday morning.]

Developing…

Is the “source close to the publisher” the same person as the “insider”? I am going to guess “yes,” and I am also going to guess that both of them are Jerome Corsi.

Also, why did Donald Trump send private investigators to Hawaii to look for this book? Couldn’t Corsi just send him a galley?

It’s not just Matt’s confusion! Here’s former envoy to the U.N. and world’s angriest walrus John Bolton on Monday: “So if Israel is going to do anything against Bushehr it has to move in the next eight days.”

And Bolton, today:

In an interview with Fox Business Network earlier Tuesday Bolton had said the deadline was eight days, but he revised it to three in the Israel Radio interview, saying Iran and Russia had announced they would begin fueling on Friday.

“It has always been optimal that military force is used before the fuel rods are inserted,” Bolton explained. “That’s what Israel did in Osirak in 1991, and when they attacked the North Korean reactor built in Syria.” Israel bombed the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981, and a Syrian reactor in 2007.

By tomorrow, Israel may have only six hours left to bomb Iran! Then, by noon, it will be too late. Iran will destroy Israel with Russian fuel rods, and it will all be because of Barack Obama’s cowardly refusal to block construction of the 9/11 terror mosque.

Moving from bizarrely retrograde to outright batshit, we turn to former Slate blogger and current failed Senate candidate Mickey Kaus, who, considering the first lady’s utterly unremarkable trip to Spain, postulates “three levels of perception.” The “Real Insider,” according to Mickey, knows that Michelle Obama’s trip (“with her daughter and an expensive posse”) means: “Jeez, they must have had some kind of fight. She’s pissed! This is a big ‘screw you.’” (Women, amirite?)

Mickey Kaus is not personally saying that Michelle Obama left Barack Obama alone on his birthday because they’re fighting! He is just saying that there are ways of perceiving her decision to do so that imply that it was a slight of some kind, due, most likely, to their fighting. (Claiming that baseless speculation is merely an analysis of how various other people will “perceive” some piece of news that had no deeper meaning until it was imbued with one by people like Mickey Kaus allows Kaus to pretend that he is not engaging in baseless speculation.)

Then, of course, Matt Drudge jumped in with, like, five headlines, calling Michelle Obama Marie Antoinette, and claiming the trip was costing taxpayers $75,000 a day. (Heavens!)

The facts are: Michelle Obama only brought along Sasha and two friends (and their kids), both of whom paid for their own lodging. The government was remimbursed for the equivalent of the airfare.

And, as Ana Marie Cox pointed out, “first lady” is not a job. Michelle Obama doesn’t have actual responsibilities, so she can just do what she wants. (Unless you are Maureen Dowd, modern woman, who seems to think it is Michelle Obama’s job to bring her husband martinis when he is done with work.)

So it’s barely costing taxpayers any more than it costs them to protect the first family when they’re at home, or anywhere else in the nation, and no one involved in the trip is slacking on their important duties back in D.C. All that leaves conservative critics (and bored late-summer cable anchors) with is outrage over the fact that Barack Obama didn’t spend his birthday with his wife. (And half of these people don’t even believe it’s his birthday!)

(What the right wing is actually doing is just getting liberals back for those jokes about Bush’s vacations that everyone so enjoyed making, back when he was on vacation more often than any other president in history. Conservatives always thought that was an unfair attack, and so therefore it is fair to lob it against Obama.)

Recalling Breitbart from his days as eager lackey to Matt Drudge, I warned from the beginning that nothing he produced would resemble journalism. More than once since then, I’ve  mentioned the accumulating evidence of deception by O’Keefe and Breitbart in creating and then publicizing the ACORN tale. It was a “scandal” that became a national story only after wildly biased coverage on Fox News Channel, followed by sloppy, scared reporting in mainstream outlets, notably the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and the national TV networks (some of whom flagellated themselves for failing to publicize this canard sooner!).

Investigations by  former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger, Brooklyn District Attorney Charles J. Hynes,  California Attorney General Jerry Brown, and the  nonpartisan Congressional Research Service, among others, have served to exonerate ACORN of the most outrageous charges of criminality  (while still criticizing ACORN employees and leadership). More important, from the perspective of journalistic ethics, those investigations revealed that the videotapes released and promoted by Breitbart’s website were selectively and deceptively edited to serve as propaganda, not news.

The Harshbarger report, commissioned by ACORN’s own board of directors, pointed to signs of chicanery when it was released last December. Although O’Keefe, his associate and fake “prostitute” Hannah Giles and Breitbart all refused to speak with Harshbarger, his researchers at the Proskauer Rose law fir were able to make preliminary comparisons between audio and video files on the Big Government website:

The videos that have been released appear to have been edited, in some cases substantially, including the insertion of a substitute voiceover for significant portions of Mr. O’Keefe’s and Ms. Giles’s comments, which makes it difficult to determine the questions to which ACORN employees are responding. A comparison of the publicly available transcripts to the released videos confirms that large portions of the original video have been omitted from the released versions.

For months, Breitbart continued to resist every request that he release the full, unedited ACORN videotapes, which ought to have alerted editors and producers that something was wrong. But then in the course of the California investigation, Brown struck a plea deal with O’Keefe, who was in jeopardy of indictment for violating the state’s privacy laws. (According to Brown’s final report, “the facts presented here strongly suggests that O’Keefe and Giles violated state privacy laws and provides fair warning to them and others that this type of activity can be prosecuted in California.”) The plea agreement deal forced O’Keefe to turn over the complete set of tapes to state investigators. Brown’s verdict on their misuse was scathing. ”The evidence illustrates that things are not always as partisan zealots portray them through highly selective editing of reality,” he said. “Sometimes a fuller truth is found on the cutting room floor.”

Meanwhile, Times public editor Clark Hoyt, like his colleagues in other mainstream outlets, has been forced to acknowledge gross errors in the paper’s coverage – such as the false claim, encouraged by Breitbart and Fox, that O’Keefe went into the ACORN offices “dressed so outlandishly [as a pimp] that he might have been playing in a risqué high school play.” In fact, the filmmaker never wore his ridiculous pimp regalia into a single ACORN office, always dressing instead like a buttoned-down junior accountant.

Amazingly, the New York Times never covered the Harshbarger report and gave little or no coverage to the other deconstructions of the Big Government “scoop” by law enforcement. Last March, when Hoyt finally offered an excuse for the failure of the Times to adequately correct and explain the complex truth behind Breitbart’s ACORN scam, it sounded weak:

The report by Harshbarger…was not covered by The Times. It should have been, but the Acorn/O’Keefe story became something of an orphan at the paper. At least 14 reporters, reporting to different sets of editors, have touched it since last fall. Nobody owns it. Bill Keller, the executive editor, said that, “sensing the story would not go away and would be part of a larger narrative,” the paper should have assigned one reporter to be responsible for it.”

Since  then much more evidence has emerged, without generating the kind of reassessment that is overdue. Now Breitbart has struck again, manipulating a gullible media establishment and a frightened administration in an attempt to destroy the reputation of an innocent federal employee.

Even today, despite overwhelming proof that he posted a snippet of the Sherrod video without any pretense of due journalistic diligence, he replies with taunts and gibes rather than any honest answers. His latest smear is to claim that the white farmers who vouched for Sherrod are not who they claim to be. On CNN, he brazenly demanded that John King explain how the cable network had determined their authenticity. Coming from a self-styled journalist who has admitted that he never sought to fact-check the  ACORN or Sherrod tapes, this is audacity verging on insanity.

Like the late Joe McCarthy, Breitbart smears both reflexively and with premeditation. And like McCarthy, he badly needs someone to show the public how he does his dirty work.

So here at last is an opportunity for the Times and all the other media outlets that aided and abetted the ACORN fraud to restore a minimum level of standards and honor. Investigate Breitbart, O’Keefe, Giles and the making and editing of the ACORN tapes without fear or favor — then report the findings on page one.