Biographer David Maraniss Downplays Obama Lies as 'Literature'

As I wrote yesterday, the media loves being lied to by Barack Obama. As we all know, the furor over a sitting President caught telling 38 falsehoods in his self-penned biography would be unquenchable were we talking about a president with an R after his name. Not to mention the lies Obama told the media about his relationship with Bill Ayers and his membership in the socialist New Party.

But as you’ll see in the clip below, Obama biographer David Maraniss, who found no less than 38 falsehoods in Obama’s bio, is determined to downplay Obama’s lying:

–

–

Naturally, the BenSmithers at BuzzFeed Politics have posted this video as a way to excuse their own partisan decision not to demand that Obama either clarify, explain, or come clean on these falsehoods.

This is how the media game is played, folks.

First the media pumps David Maraniss up as some kind of biographical god. Maraniss then releases his bio just before the election but ends it with Obama’s entrance into Harvard in order to avoid the radical Derrick Bell/Bill Ayers/Jeremiah Wright stuff. Then, after Obama is caught telling 38 lies, it’s all dutifully reported but spun – not by the White House but by journalists – into a big fat nothing-to-see-here.

In his soon-to-be-released bio, here’s how Maraniss spins Obama telling dozens of falsehoods:

His memoir, Dreams from My Father, confronts those and other questions about race. It is much more about race than about his father, a man he barely knew. I consider it an unusually insightful work in many respects, especially as an examination of his internal struggle. In that sense it is quite unlike the average book by a politician, or future politician, which is more likely to avoid self-analysis. But it is important to say that it falls into the realm of literature and memoir, not history and autobiography, and should not be read as a rigorously factual account. In his introduction Obama states, ‘For the sake of compression, some of the characters that appear are composites of people I’ve known, and some events appear out of precise chronology.’ There is more to it than that. The character creations and rearrangements of the book are not merely a matter of style, devices of compression, but are also substantive. The themes of the book control character and chronology. Time and again the narrative accentuates characters drawn from black acquaintances who played lesser roles in his real life but could be used to advance a line of thought, while leaving out or distorting the actions of friends who happened to be white. Sometimes the composites are even more complex; there are a few instances where black figures in the book have characteristics and histories that Obama took from white friends. The racial scene in his family history that is most familiar to the public, the time when he overheard his grandparents in Hawaii argue because his grandmother was afraid of a black man at the bus stop, also happens to be among those he pulled out of its real chronology and fit into a place where it might have more literary resonance. Like many other riffs in the book, it explored the parameters and frustrations of his blackness.” (David Maraniss, Barack Obama: The Story, 2012, p. xx )

Maraniss isn’t a biographer; he’s just another shill.

 

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC