First reported allegation in Corsi's Obama attack book is false

A July 30 WorldNetDaily.com article about author Jerome Corsi's forthcoming book, The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality (Threshold Editions), asserts that the book "points out" that "Barack Obama admitted using drugs in his autobiography but never revealed if or when he stopped." WND quotes Corsi, who is also a WND staff reporter, asking in the book: "Did Obama ever use drugs in his days as a community organizer in Chicago, or when he was a state senator from Illinois? ... How about in the U.S. Senate? If Obama quit using drugs, the public inquiry certain to occur in a general election campaign for the presidency will most certainly aim at the when, how and why questions George W. Bush successfully avoided." But Corsi's reported allegation that Obama "never revealed if or when he stopped" using drugs is false: Obama wrote in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father (Crown, 1995), that he "stopped getting high" shortly after moving to New York City to attend Columbia University as an undergraduate.

From Dreams From My Father (Page 120):

When Sadik lost his own lease, we moved in together. And after a few months of closer scrutiny, he began to realize that the city had indeed had an effect on me, although not the one he'd expected. I stopped getting high. I ran three miles a day and fasted on Sundays. For the first time in years, I applied myself to my studies and started keeping a journal of daily reflections and very bad poetry. Whenever Sadik tried to talk me into hitting a bar, I'd beg off with some tepid excuse, too much work or not enough cash.

As the WorldNetDaily article mentioned, Corsi is the co-author of Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry, a book that contains false and baseless attacks on Sen. John Kerry's military service. During and after the 2004 election, critics rebuked the media for having taken so long to challenge the smears against Kerry by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in Unfit for Command and in the news media, raising the question for the media: Will they have absorbed the lessons of their highly flawed Swift Boat coverage and give more immediate and more thorough scrutiny to Corsi's new book?

From Dreams From My Father (Pages 119-120):

Sadik tipped his coffee cup toward me in mock salute, his eyes searching for any immediate signs of change. And in the coming months he would continue to observe me as I traveled, like a large lab rat, through the byways of Manhattan. He would suppress a grin when the seat I had offered to a middle-aged woman on the subway was snatched up by a burly young man. At Bloomingdale's, he would lead me past human mannequins who spritzed perfume into the air and watch my reaction as I checked over the eye-popping price tags on winter coats. He would offer me lodging again when I gave up the apartment on 109th for lack of heat, and accompany me to Housing Court when it turned out that the sublessors of my second apartment had failed to pay the rent and run off with my deposit.

"Tooth and claw, Barack. Stop worrying about the rest of these bums out here and figure out how you're going to make some money out of this fancy degree you'll be getting."

When Sadik lost his own lease, we moved in together. And after a few months of closer scrutiny, he began to realize that the city had indeed had an effect on me, although not the one he'd expected. I stopped getting high. I ran three miles a day and fasted on Sundays. For the first time in years, I applied myself to my studies and started keeping a journal of daily reflections and very bad poetry. Whenever Sadik tried to talk me into hitting a bar, I'd beg off with some tepid excuse, too much work or not enough cash. One day, before leaving the apartment in search of better company, he turned to me and offered his most scathing indictment.

"You're becoming a bore."

I knew he was right, although I wasn't sure myself what exactly had happened. In a way, I was confirming Sadik's estimation of the city's allure, I suppose; its consequent power to corrupt. With the Wall Street boom, Manhattan was humming, new developments cropping up everywhere; men and women barely out of their twenties already enjoying ridiculous wealth, the fashion merchants fast on their heels. The beauty, the filth, the noise, and the excess, all of it dazzled my senses; there seemed no constraints on originality of lifestyles or the manufacture of desire -- a more expensive restaurant, a finer suit of clothes, a more exclusive nightspot, a more beautiful woman, a more potent high. Uncertain of my ability to steer a course of moderation, fearful of falling into old habits, I took on the temperament if not the convictions of a street corner preacher, prepared to see temptation everywhere, ready to overrun a fragile will.

From the July 30 WorldNetDaily.com article:

Barack Obama admitted using drugs in his autobiography but never revealed if or when he stopped, points out an explosive new book on the Democratic presidential candidate written by the co-author of 2004's "Unfit for Command," the Swift Boat exposé that impacted John Kerry's campaign for the White House.

"I blew a few smoke rings, remembering those years," Obama wrote in "Dreams From My Father," in a section of the book about his college days. "Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it."

In "The Obama Nation," a new book by Jerome Corsi, a WND staff writer, the author speculates about why Obama disclosed his drug use.

"Why Obama chose to disclose he smoked marijuana and used cocaine at all remains a mystery," Corsi writes. "Perhaps Obama felt the information would eventually come forward from his school buddies. So, to minimize the damage from this concealed fact, Obama possibly judged self-disclosure was the best route."

Obama wrote that he stopped short of shooting heroin when it was offered to him by a friend.

"I'd looked at him standing there, surrounded by big slabs of salami and roast beef, and right then an image popped into my head of an air bubble, shine and round like a pearl, rolling quietly through a vein and stopping my heart. ..."

Corsi points out Obama has yet to explain whether he ever sold drugs or when he stopped using them.

"Did Obama ever use drugs in his days as a community organizer in Chicago, or when he was a state senator from Illinois?" Corsi asks. "How about in the U.S. Senate? If Obama quit using drugs, the public inquiry certain to occur in a general election campaign for the presidency will most certainly aim at the when, how and why questions George W. Bush successfully avoided."

Obama linked drug use in his college years with his struggle for identity and specifically with issues of race.