What Maraniss Obviously Missed -- American Thinker, Jack Cashill

[bsteadman]

What Maraniss Obviously Missed

American Thinker
Jack Cashill
6/19/2012

Excerpt:

"I read the lead in the review of David Maraniss's much discussed new book, Barack Obama, the Story, by Ben Smith of Buzzfeed of with at least one eyebrow arched.

"David Maraniss's new biography of Barack Obama is the first sustained challenge to Obama's control over his own story," writes Smith, "a firm and occasionally brutal debunking of Obama's bestselling 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father."

Although those of us in the blogosphere lack Maraniss's resources and access to friendly witnesses, we have been debunking Obama's Dreams for the last four years. As I note in the introduction of my 2011 book, Deconstructing Obama, "In unlocking [Obama's] past, I have discovered that the story that Obama has been telling all his life varies from the true story in ways big and small."

Maraniss documents those variations better than I ever could have. "I counted 38 instances in which the biographer convincingly disputes significant elements of Obama's own story of his life and his family history," writes Smith. According to Maraniss, and this comes as a revelation to Smith, Obama falsified his bio largely to portray himself as "blacker and more disaffected" than he really was.

What is missing from the Maraniss book, however, is any real understanding of how Obama came to do this. A little background is in order here. It just so happened that Barack Obama was not the only black icon in his neighborhood to write a best-selling memoir. Boxing great Muhammad Ali produced one long before Obama, and he too with more than a little assistance. In Ali's case, that assistance has been well documented by black scholar Gerald Early.

According to Early, the Nation of Islam oversaw the entire production of The Greatest: My Own Story. The NOI newspaper's Marxist editor, Richard Durham, taped any number of conversations with the nearly illiterate Ali or between Ali and others and then gave them to an "editor" for writing. That editor was a young Toni Morrison. Ali's is surely the only boxing autobiography ghosted by a future Nobel Prize winner. NOI honcho Elijah Muhammad's son Herbert reviewed every page. As you might expect, Ali's Muslim helpmates rendered his story poorer, tougher, and blacker than the truth would bear. I relate this tale of literary gamesmanship in my own book, Sucker Punch.

As I came to believe early on, whoever guided Obama steered him towards a grievance narrative like Ali's, if not quite as obvious or extravagant. Even on my first reading in July 2008, I could see that Obama's muse proved particularly eloquent on the subject of the angry black male.

Phrases like "full of inarticulate resentments," "knotted, howling assertion of self," "unruly maleness," "unadorned insistence on respect" and "withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage" lace the book. Yet in the several spontaneous interviews Obama had given on the subject of race, I had not seen a glimpse of this eloquence or of this anger.

The evidence eventually led me towards an odd conclusion: The man who lent Obama his voice on the subject of blackness gave all appearances of being white. The more I researched Bill Ayers' background, the less unlikely this seemed. Skin color aside, Ayers and Obama had much in common. Both grew up in comfortable white households, attended idyllic, largely white prep schools, and have struggled to find an identity as righteous black men ever since."
.........................................

View the complete article at:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/...ly_missed.html

[bsteadman]

Biographer David Maraniss Downplays Obama Lies as ‘Literature’

Breitbart/Big-Journalism
John Nolte
6/19/2012

Excerpt:

“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 (embedded in article), 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 to not 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; and 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:

With “Character Creations And Rearrangements” That Are “Not Merely A Matter Of Style, Devices Of Compression, But Are Also Substantive,” Dreams From My Father Should “Not Be Read As A Rigorously Factual Account.” “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.” – (bold emphasis added)

View the complete article at:

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journal...or-Obama-Lies?