Hendrik Hertzberg

Last week, Media Mob wondered whether Simon & Schuster Inc. would be taken to task for allowing Threshold Editions, its conservative imprint, to publish The Obama Nation, Jerome Corsi's bestselling hit job on the presumptive Democratic nominee.

In the front of this week's New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg does exactly that. "On a foundation of small, medium-sized, and extra-large falsehoods," Mr. Hertzberg writes, "'The Obama Nation' erects a superstructure of innuendo, guilt by (often nonexistent) association, baseless speculation, and sinister-sounding but irrelevant digression."

He goes on to say that Mr. Corsi's last book—Unfit for Command, re: John Kerry—was published by Regnery, a publisher whose "sole raison d’être.  read more »

On his New Yorker blog (which you should be reading if you don't already), Hendrik Hertzberg has a fun reminiscence of his old Carter administration colleague Chris Matthews. "When I first met him, thirty or so years ago, his hair was a different color, he was skinnier, and his neckties were more random, but he was otherwise pretty much the same political jabber machine he is today," writes Mr. Hertzberg.

After recounting some details of their White House period, Mr. Hertzberg tells what it was like editing Mr. Matthews when he was helming The New Republic:

He wrote almost as fast he talked, though he was a little weak on spelling and typing. After we got our butts kicked by Reagan, Chris wrote a few pieces for The New Republic, which I had become the editor of. Editing him was like tending a lush garden—you water, you do a lot of weeding, you get something worth admiring.  read more »