It's a brassy world out there and last week's loudest clanking rang out from a man named Jerome Corsi.

One year after he was caught posting messages that likened Islam to "a virus," called its believers "boy bumpers" and offered his opinion on "ragheads," Corsi has graciously offered to lead the people of Iran, a Muslim nation, into freedom.

This is quite a stride. In 2004, Corsi was jettisoned from appearances with John O'Neill, his co-author of "Unfit for Command," the book that painted Vietnam vet John Kerry as a scoundrel, after the liberal group Media Matters for America traced dozens of messages posted on FreeRepublic.Com. After prodding, Corsi owned up to authorship of the following:

Corsi was back on the media circuit last week, this time as Jerome Corsi, founder of the Iran Freedom Foundation and author of the book "Atomic Iran: How the Terrorist Regime Bought the Bomb and American Politicians." KDKA gave him a half-hour Monday night.

A month earlier, Corsi led a half-dozen Iranian exiles on a 13-day walk from Philadelphia to Washington to highlight the evils of the current regime.

In most cases the spectacle of a man who considers Islam "satanic" and "worthless" would provide irony to last the year. But that freedom walk began in the company of Corsi's newest ally, Bijan Sepasy, president of the Iranian Freedom Foundation.

Sepasy only did the first day, but it can be argued he's fairly new to the concept of Iranian freedom. Twelve years ago he was the paid lobbyist for the Islamic Republic of Iran, working to better the image and fortunes of the very mullahs Corsi professes to want to overthrow.

Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi, an Iranian expatriate whose journalist father has spent a decade in prison as guest of the ayatollahs, said she tried to explain to Corsi how Sepasy's past would put him beyond the trust of the Iranian freedom movement in the United States.

She said Corsi screamed at her over the phone.

"You know what he said to me? 'You Iranians are all [expletive] up. You're the nastiest, most pathetic people I've ever met. You can't stop insulting each other.' "

Sepasy was promptly expelled from The Alliance for Democracy in Iran, the largest, mainstream Iranian freedom group in the United States. Corsi has stayed with him.

"In 12 years, people change a lot," Sepasy told me when I asked about his previous job.

He would have a great deal of changing to do. Consider what he said in a 1992 letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times:

"Elections in Iran this spring were free and open. An overwhelming majority of moderates swept to power in the Majlis, or parliament. Moreover, the press also is free and open."

Two weeks earlier, Sepasy sent a peppery little missive to The Washington Times, decrying the "villainization of Iran" and implied the regime has no nuclear ambitions.

This sort of news would come as a shock to Sepasy's new sponsor, Corsi, whose new book works on the premise that Iran is close to getting the bomb, largely thanks to Democrats in the United States.

It is hard to tell whether Sepasy has changed his politics or merely his employer. Presumably he now regards Iran as a captive nation, but continued to defend his past lobbying.

"It took place by a certain understanding," he said. "I cannot reveal everything, but it was an understanding of the U.S. government."

Sepasy did seem to have picked up one new skill from his new master, though. In the course of our interview, he called his critics "retarded," and Zand-Bonazzi "that dyke."

Corsi might have defended Sepasy's remarks the same way he defended his own trash talk on Islam and Catholicism and other topics when I phoned to confront him on KDKA.

"I was being provocative," he said. He wanted to "encourage discussion." The remarks, he said, were "taken out of context," as if there is a context for discussing religion and politics by suggesting one's motives are pederasty and corruption. He went on to suggest that maybe I approve of child molesting. Quite a debater, this Corsi.

Kenneth Timmerman, a conservative scholar, explored Sepasy's odd lobbying contract in his own book, "Countdown to Crisis: The Coming Nuclear Showdown With Iran." His criticism of Corsi is not so much on what he did that is old, but his newness.

"Jerry Corsi is unknown to the Iranian community and the pro-democracy movement in Iran," Timmerman said. "Until he published a book on Iran. That has made some people suspicious of his motives."

The Iranian democracy movement, already a fractious enterprise in which allies fight each other harder than they do their mutual enemy, the ayatollahs, does not need such a man as Jerome Corsi, if only because he adds a new and unneeded layer of implausibility to an argument stuggling for an audience.

"Meanwhile," said Zand-Bonazzi, an Iranian exile with a father in the mullahs' prison, "none of us ever gets heard. That's what freaks me out. No one's willing to speak to us. But they bring someone like Jerry Corsi? When did Jerry Corsi end up knowing more than I do?"