Barack Obama: The Story by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Washington Post editor David Maraniss hit the book stores last month. It presents some three dozen discrepancies between documented facts and the account of his life that Barack Obama presented in his 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.
The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, a 2010 book by David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker magazine, also judged Dreams to be “a mixture of verifiable fact, recollection, recreation, invention, and artful shaping.”
Two of the discrepancies Maraniss reports are about women who allegedly helped Obama embrace his African heritage and reject his White half.
Dreams tells about “Regina,” a black student at Occidental College who allegedly helped the young Obama embrace his African heritage. She was actually based on Michelle Obama, who Barack did not meet until 8 years later.
Dreams also tells about Barack quarreling with a White girlfriend following a Black theater production in Manhattan. Supposedly, this was a terrible experience that left poor Black Barack feeling more acutely estranged from White people than ever. Except, the incident was mostly made up and the closest analog actually happened later in Chicago where said White girlfriend reports Dreams “greatly exaggerated” the drama.
Obama apologists claim it doesn’t matter if Dreams is full of lies.
“I don’t think it much matters whether Barack Obama has told the absolute truth in Dreams From My Father. What’s important is how he wanted to construct his life.”
In other words, it’s no biggie that Barack made up stuff, because it furthers the Aggrieved Black Narrative he has chosen as his own personal life story.
Too bad about all the clear evidence that Barack Obama’s life has been marked by privilege in the form of posh schools and easy career advancement. I mean, if you’re going to write a whole book about how HARD your life has been, it helps if your life has actually been hard.
Maybe if his alcoholic, bigamist father had been White and the family that loved and nurtured, fed, clothed, housed, and educated him from birth to adulthood had been Black, there’d be some teeth in his “aggrieved” schtick. As it is, all I can think is,
“What a self-centered, whiney little twerp, trying to ride the victim coat-tails of people who had actual problems because of their skin color.”
H/t to GP for source @ Obama’s ‘American story’ faces fresh scrutiny by James Rosen – July 05, 2012
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/07/04/obama-american-story-faces-fresh-scrutiny/
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