On October 1, WorldNetDaily.com (WND) founder, editor, and CEO Joseph Farah, who recently denied that WorldNetDaily is a “conservative” news site, welcomed his “new friend” Jerome R. Corsi to WND's “stable” of columnists.
Farah accurately described Corsi as “the co-author” of the discredited anti-Kerry book Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry (Regnery, 2004); Media Matters for America has repeatedly demonstrated that the book's claims are false. Perhaps Farah was unaware that Corsi's partisan and discredited co-author, John E. O'Neill -- to whom Farah referred as “the heroic John O'Neill” -- now claims Corsi merely edited the book.
O'Neill attempted to distance himself from Corsi after Media Matters for America exposed the extreme statements Corsi made on the conservative website Free Republic's online forums -- including describing Muslims as "[r]agheads" and "[b]oy-bumpers" and saying, "[b]oy buggering in both Islam and Catholicism is okay with the Pope as long as it isn't reported by the liberal press." O'Neill then began claiming Corsi was “simply an editor and not really any sort of co-author,” but as Media Matters for America documented, Farah is correct: Corsi did, by any measure, co-author the book.
In his debut WND column October 1, Corsi revisited the same discredited lie that he and O'Neill forwarded in Unfit for Command and which Swift Boat Veterans for Truth -- the anti-Kerry group O'Neill co-founded -- has also touted: the false charge that Kerry “betrayed the over 2 million men and women who served honorably in Vietnam when he testified to Sen. Fulbright's committee in April 1971 that they were the army of Genghis Khan, committing war crimes on a daily basis.” As MMFA has repeatedly noted, in his 1971 Senate testimony, Kerry was relating the stories of other Vietnam veterans who came home and testified to their personal experiences.