Meghan McCain, the de facto leader of the GOP’s moderate wing, just posted this racy photo on her Twitter feed.

I’ve been experiencing some problems with my blog but I think my tech guru, Shama Davis, has worked them out. So now I can belatedly post some video I shot from Michigan Ave after the big Grant Park rally. This is the sight and sound of the Republican death shroud lifting:

An hour after the announcement of Obama’s victory, I received a flood of texts and phone calls from friends across the country — from DC to New York to Anchorage, Alaska — telling me people had filled the streets of their cities to celebrate. It was a dreamlike moment for me. After covering the campaign since early 2007, and the right since the middle of Bush’s first term, I could not have imagined witnessing such a cathartic national celebration of the death of Republicanism. 

The passage of Prop 8 dampened my sense of elation. It is clear that the Christian right is not going away any time soon, and that the movement has staked out the battle over gay rights as the final phase of the culture war. Considering that black Democrats were arguably the swing vote in Prop 8’s passage, Barack Obama must do more to cultivate his most loyal base of support against insidious Christian right ploys. 

Obama’s selection of Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff did not surprise me. For all his post-partisan posturing, Obama is at his core a political animal who knows he won’t survive his first two years without playing hardball. The congressional Republicans are more extreme than ever, and consequently more marginalized. By using social issues and tax policy to hammer Obama, and by ginning up pseudo-scandals as they did under Clinton, the congressional GOP hopes to peel off a dozen or more seats in 2010. As a veteran of Clinton’s battles with Gingrich, Rahm understands this is no time for bipartisanship. I have my issues with him on policy — his support for the Shuler anti-immigrant bill, ramming NAFTA through Congress, his extreme Likudnik tendencies (see these shocking comments by his father, a former Irgun member) — but his political instincts seem good. On the other hand, he could alienate everybody and foster a dysfunctional environment in the White House. Time will tell.

Obama’s likely Treasury Secretary, Larry Summers, is another issue. Read what I think about him below the fold.

Lawrence Summers is on a very short list of possible nominees for Secretary of Treasury. His selection has been complicated, however, by his destructive performance as president of Harvard University, a rocky term he finally sabotaged by revealing his opinion that women lack the mental aptitude to succeed in science.

But there is a lesser known episode in Summers’ past that further highlights his reckless tendencies, and foreshadows a politically nettlesome nomination process.

On December 12, 1991, while serving as chief economist for the World Bank, Summers authored a private memo arguing that the bank should actively encourage the dumping of toxic waste in developing countries, particularly “under populated countries in Africa,” which Summers described as “UNDER-polluted.” Summers added that public outrage over the heightened rates of prostate cancer caused by his proposed dumping would be mitigated by the fact that poor people in developing countries rarely live long enough to develop prostate cancer.

Read the full Summers memo here.

When the Summers memo leaked to the public in February 1992, Brazil’s Secretary of the Environment, Jose Lutzenburger, responded with an indignant missive. “Your reasoning is perfectly logical but totally insane,” Lutzenburger told Summers. “Your thoughts [provide] a concrete example of the unbelievable alienation, reductionist thinking, social ruthlessness and the arrogant ignorance of many conventional ‘economists’ concerning the nature of the world we live in… If the World Bank keeps you as vice president it will lose all credibility.”

If Obama nominates Summers, he will send a dispiriting message to governments of developing countries — especially in Africa — just as they have begun to look at the United States as a beacon of hope.

Back in the U.S., Summers’ nomination would prompt a reexamination by the media of the countless controversies he has fomented. Even an episode as tangential as Summers’ romantic fling with right-wing hatemonger Laura Ingraham could become a source of political embarrassment for the White House. Summers should be left to write his memoirs, not memos.

At the Daily Beast, my new online haunt, I detail the career of Michelle Bachmann, possibly the weirdest Republican member of congress. Her strange gaffes and bizarre acts are so extensive I had prioritize for space. But this may be take the cake:

In 2005, while serving in the Minnesota state senate, Bachmann crept surreptitiously to the perimeter of a protest against a bill banning same-sex marriage. She ducked behind a bush, and for several minutes, Bachmann and a staffer observed the rally like spies. When a demonstrator approached the half-hidden Bachmann with a camera in hand, she scurried away, jumped in an SUV, and bolted from the scene.

Bachmann is still even in the polls with her insurgent Democratic rival in one of the most conservative districts in the country. Will she be the posterchild for Republican disaster on election day? We’re about to find out.

How did a racist, conspiratorial crank become the GOP's anti-Obama point man?

These are good times for Jerome Corsi. Already notorious for his factually challenged book-length takedown of 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, Unfit For Command, the 61-year-old Corsi has another hit on his hands. His new book, Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality has made Corsi a hot commodity again on the right-wing radio circuit, the bane of the Obama campaign and catapulted to the top slot on the New York Times bestseller list. With his newfound notoriety, Corsi has brought his pathographic anti-Obama narrative to hundreds of thousands of readers–and millions on radio and TV–just as he did with Kerry. Corsi has become the court bard of the conservative movement. “The goal is to defeat Obama,” Corsi told the New York Times. “I don’t want Obama to be in office.”

Corsi’s success represents the apotheosis of a long, strange trip from the furthest shores of the right into the national spotlight. During George W. Bush’s first term, Corsi was a little-known financial services marketing specialist. In 1995, according to the Boston Globe, he coaxed twenty people into a shadowy investment venture in Poland that ultimately lost them a total of $1.2 million. “It ruined my career in the brokerage business, and it was a sad story for a lot of people,” said Bradley Amundson, one of those enlisted into Corsi’s bungled scheme. The FBI opened an investigation but never filed any charges.

Corsi had dabbled off-and-on the fringes of conservative backlash politics for nearly three decades. In his spare time, which he appeared to have lots of, Corsi busied himself at his computer, firing off opinions on the far-right website Free Republic, marked by their sexual and racial obsessions.

In a comment typical of the dozens he posted under the handle “jrlc,” Corsi wrote, “Anybody ask why HELLary couldn’t keep BJ Bill satisfied? Not lesbo or anything, is she?” In another, he ranted, “Isn’t the Democratic Party the official SODOMIZER PROTECTION ASSOCIATION of AMERICA–oh, I forgot, it was just an accident that Clintoon’s [sic] first act in office was to promote ‘gays in the military.’ RAGHEADS are Boy-Bumpers as clearly as they are Women-Haters–it all goes together.”

Then he composed Unfit For Command, suddenly vaulting into best-sellerdom. Surrounded by the media buzz of talk radio and Fox News, Corsi no longer plied the seamy troll-zones of the right-wing blogosphere. Overnight, he had become a conservative folk hero. But as Bush’s popularity waned during his second term, Corsi’s star dimmed. He tried to reignite it by co-authoring a book with “prophecy expert” Michael Evans, Showdown with Nuclear Iran, calling on the United States and Israel to attack Iran “before it’s too late,” and another, Black Gold Stranglehold, claiming to expose the Big Lie that will “enslave” Americans: “the belief that oil is a fossil fuel and a finite resource.” Corsi’s conspiracy theories consolidated his cult status, but he did not revive the brightness of his Swiftboating campaign. As another presidential election approached, however, Corsi followed his well-trod path back to renown.

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.”

Baldwin also believes that “moneychangers” of a certain Chosen People are “Destroying America–and Christians Don’t See It.” That is the title of a commentary he wrote in February of 2008. In it, he wrote: “The moneychangers of Jesus’ day were the equivalent of the international bankers of our day. With the consent and approbation of the Jewish leaders, these bankers set up shop in the Temple. Their purpose was to exchange whatever currency the Jewish worshipper brought with him or her into Jewish currency, which would then be used to purchase whatever sacrifice the worshipper required.” For proof, Baldwin cited the investigations of his associate, “Dr. Jerry Corsi,” who had bravely “exposed the moneychangers who are the driving force behind the burgeoning North American Union.”

Backed by Corsi, Baldwin seized the Constitution Party’s nomination this May. Then he unfurled a bold new agenda, calling for “an independent investigative committee to analyze” whether the attacks of 9/11 were an inside government job. Corsi, for his part, shared Baldwin’s skepticism. “The government’s explanation of the jet fuel fire is not a sufficient explanation,” Corsi said in January on the radio show hosted by Alex Jones, a fellow Baldwin supporter who promotes himself as “the grandfather of what has come to be known as the 9/11 Truth Movement.”

“With people like you starting to question 9/11 with the science,” Jones marveled, “boy that’s really gonna…”

“That’s what rattles the cage,” said Corsi in a self-satisfied tone.

In late 2007, with Obama in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, Corsi gleaned a new opportunity to “rattle the cage.” 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.

Like Unfit For Command, which wrongly claimed that Kerry had falsified combat reports in order to earn medals in Vietnam, Obama Nation was larded with crackpot smears cobbled together from assorted right-wing blog posts. Corsi asserted, for example, that Obama had “extensive connections to Islam,” that he may have snorted cocaine in the Senate, and that he has staffed his campaign with card-carrying communists (including the former youth politics reporter at The Nation, Sam Graham-Felsen, an official Obama blogger and self-described progressive Democrat).

But even as Media Matters for America documented an extensive litany of falsehoods and misrepresentations in Obama Nation, and a nearly unanimous chorus of reviewers panned the book–”poisonous crap,” according to Time columnist Joe Klein–the Obama campaign could not afford to repeat Kerry’s fatal mistake of ignoring Corsi and leaving the debunking to the press. On August 14, the Obama campaign released a forty-one-page “investigative report on the lies in Jerome Corsi’s Obama Nation, entitled, Unfit For Publication. While the booklet systematically undermined the credibility of Corsi’s writing, it also underlined the pivotal role Corsi played in the Republican attack machine.

Thrown on the defensive by the revelation of Corsi’s myriad factual errors, Matalin rushed to her author’s defense. Obama Nation, she told the New York Times, “was not designed to be, and does not set out to be a political book. Instead, it is “a piece of scholarship, and a good one at that.” Following Matalin’s lead, the conservative movement rallied to Corsi’s side. Rush Limbaugh hailedObama Nation as a “pretty damn good” book; Fox News host Sean Hannity hosted Corsi twice on his top-rated Hannity and Colmes, asking him during his second appearance whether Obama was ever a drug dealer. Meanwhile, the National Review’s Mark Levin assailed the media for “wanting to know about anything [Corsi] has ever said or written and his associations.” Even John McCain refused to condemn Corsi’s work. When asked by a reporter about Obama Nation, McCain responded simply, “Gotta keep your sense of humor.”

Though the conservative movement’s most influential media personalities are clamoring for interviews, Corsi still found time to visit the fringe figures that had promoted his conspiratorial tracts during his lean years between campaigns. On August 4, Corsi reunited with Alex Jones, the 9/11 “Truther,” to claim that Obama “really” was a Muslim. “We should not have anybody as president who–both their parents aren’t Americans,” Jones barked. “Bottom line, that’s always been the way it is.” Two weeks later, Corsi scheduled a spot on something called “James Edwards’ Political Cesspool,” a show he had already appeared on in July.

Who is James Edwards? A 28-year-old self-described “white nationalist,” he has leveraged sponsorship from neo-Nazi and Holocaust denial groups to become America’s most popular white supremacist radio host. On his website, Edwards has boasted of his friendship with neo-Nazi activist David Duke, and written “slavery is the greatest thing that ever happened to” African-Americans. He also warned “Hollywood promotes white genocide.” For Edwards, Corsi’s anti-Obama attacks were only a slight detour from the racialist ranting his show usually entertains.

However, when the Southern Poverty Law Center and Media Matters reported on Corsi’s planned appearance on Edwards’ show, Corsi quietly withdrew, claiming through his publicist that “travel plans have changed.” Bigger venues, in any case, await him. Once again, he’s a star–the crank acclaimed by conservatives as the greatest investigative journalist of the day.