C-SPAN2 BOOK TV – “Barack Obama: The Story”

11 Responses to C-SPAN2 BOOK TV – “Barack Obama: The Story”

1. Bruce says:

   June 19, 2012 at 5:44 pm

   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-Journalism/2012/06/19/Obama-Biographer-Makes-Excuses-For-Obama-Lies?
2. Bruce says:

   June 19, 2012 at 6:31 pm

   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/2012/06/what_maraniss_obviously_missed.html
3. ARNOLD CARL TAPP says:

   June 21, 2012 at 1:33 am

   A LIAR IS A LIAR IS A LIAR . ” WE THE PEOPLE ” STRONGLY BELIEVE ( KNOW ) THAT ANYONE WHO IS ELECTED TO PUBLIC OFFICE SHOULD BE HONEST AND OPEN ABOUT EVERY ASPECT OF HIS LIFE , BUSINESS , RELIGION , POLITICAL POSITION AND EVERYTHING ELSE . THAT INCLUDES POLICE , MINISTERS , ADVISORS , INVESTMENT BROKERS , TEACHERS , LAWYERS , JUDGES AND MANY OTHERS . ” WE ” DO NOT AND MUST NOT TOLERATE ANY LESS FROM THESE PEOPLE IF THEY WANT TO HOLD THEMSELVES OUT AS SOMEONE “WE” CAN BELIEVE IN AND TRUST . THE PROBLEM WITH EVERY BRANCH AND PART OF OUR GOVERNMENT IS THAT THEY ARE MOSTLY LIARS , AND HAVE BETRAYED OUR TRUST . THE WORST LIARS IN THE HISTORY OF AMERICA ARE obummer AND EVERYONE IN HIS ENTIRE MIS~ADMINISTRATION . ALSO , THE ENTIRE GANG OF LAMESTREAM ENEMEDIA ARE IN ON THE GREAT LIE . ” WE ” MUST RID AMERICA OF THEM .
4. Bruce says:

   June 21, 2012 at 2:48 pm

   Obama bio further confuses birth issue

   Exclusive: Jack Cashill identifies ‘obviously inflated memories’ from 1961 Hawaii

   WND
   Jack Cashill
   6/20/2012

   Excerpt:

   Understandably, the publishers of David Maraniss’ much discussed new biography, “Barack Obama: The Story,” released advanced copies to mainstream reviewers. (Full disclosure here, Simon & Schuster also published my book “Deconstructing Obama.”)

   Spinning Maraniss’ revelations as favorably as they could, at least a few reviewers claimed that his book would at least put the birther issue to rest given his interviews with the health professionals attending the birth.

   In fact, the Maraniss book does quite the opposite. Although I remain agnostic about the where and when of Obama’s birth, Maraniss’ account makes me all the more suspicious of the official Obama narrative.

   As I wrote yesterday, Maraniss, like all other mainstream biographers, tells us not a single word about the life of Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, in the six months leading up to Obama’s birth.

   In discussing the birth itself, Maraniss reports that Obama was born at 7:24 in the evening of Aug. 4, 1961 at Kapi’olani Hospital. As reference, he cites “State of Hawaii Certificate of Live Birth,” presumably the one posted online in April 2011.

   Although his book is otherwise exquisitely detailed, Maraniss adds not a single shred of information regarding the circumstances of Obama’s birth. The reader has no idea how Ann got to the hospital, who accompanied her, how difficult was the labor, how big was the baby, who took her home, or where she went when she left the hospital.

   Maraniss strongly suggests, however, that Ann did not return to the house her parents were sharing with the Pratt family at 6085 Kalanianole, the address listed on the certificate and in the newspaper announcements. The Pratt daughter, he reports, “has no memory of the Dunhams’ daughter bringing an infant home.”

   Maraniss repeatedly stresses that Barack Obama Sr. did not at any time live with Ann and definitively states that “[Dunham] and Obama and the infant never lived [at 6085 Kalanianole].”

   Knowing that there is more than a little controversy surrounding Obama’s birth, Maraniss obviously feels the need to add some confirming detail of the Kapi’olani birth. This he does, but given the seriousness of the subject, the anecdote he shares undermines his credibility.

   As Maraniss relates, shortly after the birth, Honolulu ob-gyn Rod West was having lunch with visiting friend Barbara Czurles-Nelson, then a journalist. Czurles-Nelson asks if anything interesting happened this week, and West replies, “Stanley had a baby. Now that’s something to write home about.”

   This account is not Maraniss’ strongest moment. Czurles-Nelson has been telling this story for several years. In January 2009, on the occasion of Obama’s inauguration, she was interviewed by the Buffalo News.

   “I may be the only person left who specifically remembers his birth,” Czurles-Nelson told the reporter. “His parents are gone, his grandmother is gone, the obstetrician who delivered him is gone.” According to the Buffalo News, that obstetrician was “Dr. Rodney T. West,” who had recently died.

   WND interviewed Czurles-Nelson in January 2009. Here, she clarified that she had never cited West as the actual doctor, but rather as the person who passed the story along to her. That did not stop Snopes and other defenders of the Obama mythology from claiming that West was the doctor who delivered Obama.

   Czurles-Nelson shows up later in the Maraniss book, now as a teacher at Punahou where Obama is a student. We are told that when the visiting Obama Sr. comes to Punahou to speak, it is such an occasion that Czurles-Nelson comes to see him and improbably brings Dr. West with her.

   Later still, Obama becomes a student in Czurles-Nelson’s English class. Interviewed by Maraniss 35 years later, she can still quote Obama’s pithy comments word for word.

   If that were not wondrous enough, basketball fan Czurles-Nelson remembers Obama’s “court sense.” On those few occasions he got into a game, she remembers, “He could see the pattern and zero in on the opening.”

   One serious flaw in Maraniss’ reporting is that he gives too much credence to obviously inflated memories. A glaring example, one that has been cited often as fact, is of the paper Obama allegedly wrote as a schoolboy in Indonesia in which he said, “Someday I want to be president.”

   Maraniss quotes the entire, seemingly impressive paper, both in English and in the Indonesian language, Bahasa. He then adds, “The paper no longer exists, though [the teacher’s] memory is precise and there is no reason not to trust it.” No, David, there is every reason not to trust it.

   Czurles-Nelson remembers much too much as well. In the gratuitously lengthy account of the “Stanley” story, the reader learns, for instance, that 50 years earlier she and Dr. West were sitting “near the lunch buffet.” Please!”
   ……………………………………….

   View the complete article at:

   Obama bio further confuses birth issue
5. Bruce says:

   July 10, 2012 at 5:49 pm

   Review: Maraniss’s Barack Obama: The Story – Two Lies Do Not Equal Truth

   Breitbart/Big-Journalism
   Joel B. Pollak
   7/9/2012

   Excerpt:

   “David Maraniss’s Barack Obama: The Story has made headlines for revealing that the 44th President fabricated significant parts of his first memoir, Dreams from My Father. Yet in correcting Obama’s myths, Maraniss indulges one of his own: that Obama’s fibs are to be understood as mere features of “literature and memoir,” and that his life still remains a heroic triumph of self-mastery, which only the hateful could fail to understand.

   In Maraniss’s telling, Obama’s eventual political success is made possible by his early struggle to reconcile the various strands of his diverse past. The one common thread in the lives of Obama’s forebears is the sense of being an outsider–a jadak, as Obama’s Kenyan grandfather was once called. Obama triumphs by accepting, and overcoming, his outsider status–though his political enemies continue to consider him an alien today.

   That is more useful as a description of how Obama is seen by the mainstream media and liberal gentry than as an account of Obama’s path to the presidency. It reflects an obsession with who Obama is rather than what he has done–which is why Maraniss mistakes opposition to Obama for prejudice. Maraniss shows scant interest in Obama’s political journey, and even leaves critical questions about his personal life unanswered.

   What Barack Obama: The Story provides is not a portrait of a president in the making–indeed, aside from “composite girlfriends” and the marijuana-smoking “Choom Gang,” there is little of interest about Obama at all. Instead, it reveals, unwittingly, a persistent literary struggle between Obama and the journalistic establishment to write the story of Obama’s life–a story that in either telling is fictional, as well as intensely polemical.

   The title of Maraniss’s book declares that his is to be “the” story, the definitive account of Obama’s life. Yet it does not reach past Obama’s decision, in early 1988, to leave his job as a community organizer in Chicago and to attend Harvard Law. In fact, most of the book is about Obama’s ancestors. Aside from Obama’s father, whose tragic life in the midst of Kenyan liberation deserves a book of its own, many of the details are tedious.

   The minutiae of the lives of Obama’s distant relatives are only relevant to those who see Obama–as Maraniss clearly does–as somehow encompassing his relatives’ variations (or, less sympathetically, inheriting all of their faults). Maraniss’s choice to describe the story of Obama’s life in this way suggests that he is fully invested in the identity politics of the left–which Obama transcended, yet still manipulates to his political advantage.

   Maraniss’s primary aim is to re-trace many of the paths Obama traveled in Dreams–and in certain areas, his research is impressive. Yet he leaves many stories untouched–the cocaine habit, the conversion with Jeremiah Wright (Wright’s role is minimized in favor of Rev. Alvin Love, with whom Obama organized on the South Side). Maraniss shows no interest in the authorship of Dreams itself, though he has access to Obama’s book proposal, and spoke to Obama’s second publisher (after he failed to deliver for the first).

   Though Maraniss is an historian, he does not provide footnotes in the text, leaving the reader to hunt for references in the back, where there seem to be many gaps. There is much that is omitted from this purportedly authoritative biography, and it is evident that Maraniss’s corrective to Dreams is as poitical, in a quiet, earnest way, as the original.

   Maraniss finds literally dozens of places in which Obama stretched the truth or simply made things up in Dreams. His grandfather in Kenya was not tortured by the British, nor was his stepfather’s family in Indonesia hunted down by Dutch colonial forces. His politically conscious friend “Regina,” who challenged Obama to sharpen his political sensibilities in college, was not an African-American woman but almost certainly a white female.

   Some of the fabrications are possibly attributable to family lore–and many of Obama’s predecessors, on both sides, seem to have had a penchant for telling tall tales. But the bulk are Obama’s own. In places, Obama fibs while pretending to reveal something he is in fact concealing (such as his heavy marijuana habit). Generally, however, his myths have a common theme: they make him seem more exotic, and more authentically black.

   Maraniss knows that much of Obama’s story, as presented in Dreams–is simply untrue. Yet he remains fascinated by the different parts of that story, the improbable lives that made Obama’s own life possible. “That is how history works,” he concludes at one point, amazed by how “random” relationships in remote places could one day yield the 44th President of the United States. He is a skeptic, but remains enchanted by Obama.

   That is why, implausibly, the historian in Maraniss lets Obama off the hook so easily for distorting his past. Nowhere does Maraniss consider the context in which Dreams was published in 1995–namely, the fact that Obama was about to launch his political career, and likely hoped to use the book to create what he hoped would be a credible persona in his African-American district and among impressionable journalists and donors.

   Obama was not creating “literature” in Dreams, though he may have believed he was doing so. His first memoir, like his second, is a work of agitprop, and his lies–for that is what many of them are–ought not be excused by the fact that he admitted openly that some of his characters were “compressed.” (Oprah Winfrey, who did so much to promote Obama’s presidential candidacy, has punished other authors for similar fabrications.)

   The lies in Dreams cannot merely be dismissed–as Maraniss seems to do–as a once-off event, a sort of literary rite of passage for a young leader struggling with his identity. Obama lies habitually about his past–he is doing it still. Last week, for example, Obama told an audience in Parma, OH about his campaign for State Senate in 1996, casting it as a struggle against daunting odds: “we didn’t have a budget, we didn’t have TV ads.”

   In reality, Obama ran unopposed–after knocking his Democratic rivals off the primary ballot, one of the few controversial episodes from Obama’s past (see video below) to which mainstream journalists paid (brief) attention in 2008. (Less well known is the fact that Obama was backed financially by fraudster Tony Rezko.) Obama is surely aware that the real story is known, but he cannot resist the urge to twist the facts, casting himself as a hero.
   ……………………………….

   View the complete article at:

   http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2012/07/09/Review-Maraniss-Barack-Obama-The-Story-Two-Lies-Do-Not-Equal-Truth
6. saraswati tara says:

   September 18, 2012 at 12:20 am

   As a very comfortable Kenyan ensconced in very dark Nilotic skin I find this statement about my kinsman a sad commentary of the limitations of American freedom….. “Obama falsified his bio largely to portray himself as “blacker and more disaffected” than he really was.”
   Oy Ve! now he’s not `black enough??? For the record his kinship is patriarchal and as such to us he is Luo. And we are very BLACK but find no fault with it nor with children borne to our sons. Amazing what freedom of speech and too much funding breeds. Happy illusions-for a reality check visit Kenya and stop watching CNN etc.
7. Bruce says:

   September 18, 2012 at 2:47 am

   ‘Tara’ is a wrathful form of the Hindu Goddess ‘Saraswati’.

   http://satyavidya.com/tarama.htm

   In Hinduism, Saraswati is the goddess of knowledge, music, arts and science.

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saraswati

   I have no idea why an admirer of the Hindu Goddess of knowledge is a fan of Kenyan-Born Obama, the Proven Fraud and Ineligible POTUS and has now started contacting us, apparently from Kenya, in his defense. However, she is certainly welcome to post here.

   — Interesting, but a bit strange!
8. ARNOLD CARL TAPP says:

   September 21, 2012 at 3:46 am

   @ saraswati tara:
   THE ONLY LIMITATIONS OF FREEDOM IN AMERICA ARE THOSE IMPOSED BY YOUR KINSMAN AND COUNTRYMAN B.H.O. WE ARE NOT OPPOSED TO GOOD HONEST , PATRIOTIC PEOPLE WITH BLACK SKIN . LUCAS SMITH , THE ORIGINATOR OF THIS BLOG IS BLACK , AND SO IS B . STEADMAN . WE WOULD HAVE GLADLY CHOSEN ALAN KEYES , ALLEN WEST OR HERMAN CAIN FOR PRESIDENT BECAUSE THEY ARE NATURAL BORN CITIZENS OF AMERICA . DO NOT PLAY THE ‘ RACE CARD ‘ WITH US ~ obummer HAS THE MARKET CORNERED ON THAT .WE ALL KNOW THAT CNN , ABC , CBS AND ALL OTHER NEWS MEDIA ARE ULTRA LIBERAL AND WE PAY NO ATTENTION TO THEM .
9. saraswati tara says:

   October 6, 2012 at 12:57 am

   Bruce and Arnold,
   Seems like my response was edited down to convey what suits the mindset of the vitriol you spew! At least have the balls to respond and or publish entire contents of responses to be fair and stop jumping to conclusions Bruce . Saraswati means a lot more and not exclusive to your quick google search.I still maintain the ?
   Is Jeb Bush’s wife Mexican or Alien?
10. Bruce says:

    October 6, 2012 at 1:07 pm

    We Have Been Duped: The Story

    American Thinker
    Don Wilkie
    10/4/2012

    Excerpts:

    “The American people have been duped. We are victims of an organized campaign to give legitimacy to a fable. The fable concerns Barack Obama’s origins — the “improbable love” his parents shared. This fable proved so captivating that four years after he told it at the 2004 Democratic Convention, the American people elected the storyteller to the presidency of the United States.

    The fairy-tale is found in the pages of Obama’s book, Dreams from My Father. When Obama began his campaign, there were very few sources that could verify the story told within its pages. Most of the central characters had died, including the mother, father, and maternal grandfather. The maternal grandmother who died shortly before the 2008 election was kept sequestered and was allowed to talk to the press only if the reporter had a “minder” from the Obama camp. Early Obama biographer David Mendell admits as much.

    There were others, though, who proclaimed that the fable was true. These were friends of father Barack Obama, Sr. in Hawaii and friends of mother Ann Dunham in Seattle. Their recollections mirror the fable found in Dreams. In light of what we know today, much of what these friends have attested to is simply impossible. If we accept that the friends are not delusional, that they are able to tell the difference between fact and fiction, then they must have been intentionally falsifying their memories to protect the fable in Dreams.
    ……………………………………………
    Neil Abercrombie and the Snack Bar Crowd

    Neil Abercrombie, current governor of Hawaii, and others whom Maraniss called the “snack bar crowd” falsely testified to the behavior and activities of Barack Obama Sr.
    ……………………………………………
    Ann’s Friends in Seattle

    The two people who have supplied the most information about Ann Dunham are her two Mercer Island high school friends: Susan Botkin Blake and Maxine Box. The easiest way to understand their prevarications is to analyze the story they tell of Ann’s “visit” to Seattle. There are at least three versions:
    ……………………………………………

    Careful historian Maraniss might more accurately be described as an “enabling dissembler.” By looking at the three versions of the “visit,” it is clear that as conflicting facts have been discovered, recollections have been conveniently modified to fit them. From the initial version of a young woman, “crazy in love,” stopping off in Seattle in 1961 on her way to see her beloved in Boston, who by the way wouldn’t be in Boston for another year, we find out that the “visit” really happened a year later in August 1962 — and when it becomes clear that Ann moved to Seattle and was never on her way to see her husband in Boston, we wind up with a totally innocuous story reset to 1961 of two friends visiting one afternoon for an amiable chat.

    It is clear that people are lying. It is clear they are lying to protect a fraudulent story. It is clear that the official Obama nativity story is bunkum. Those who have orchestrated this cover-up should be ashamed of themselves for trying to fool us.

    We should be ashamed of ourselves if we allow them to do it.”

    View the complete article at:

    http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/10/we_have_been_duped_the_story.html
11. ARNOLD CARL TAPP says:

    October 8, 2012 at 3:19 am

    @ saraswati tara:
    YOUR MORONIC RAMBLINGS ARE NOT WORTH A REPLY OR EXPLANATION .
    WHO GIVES A RAT ‘ S ASS WHETHER JEB BUSH IS MARRIED TO A MEXICAN , AMERICAN , OR A SPACE ALIEN . SHE IS NOT RUNNING FOR THE OFFICE OF PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES .
    CRAWL BACK UNDER YOU ROCK AND DISAPPEAR FOREVER .