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Obama's Memoir A Tissue Of Lies Posted 05/03/2012 EDITORIAL Public Trust: Our president, it seems, is quite the fabulist. A new book reveals he fabricated yet another story in his 1995 memoir, this one about a white girlfriend complaining about black anger. In his supposedly nonfiction memoir, "Dreams From My Father," Obama claims he and the girlfriend got into a "big fight" after seeing a New York play by a black writer. He became annoyed when she allegedly asked "why black people were so angry all the time." Obama biographer David Maraniss contacted the former girlfriend, Genevieve Cook, who insists the scene never took place. She says they never even saw a show by a black playwright. Maraniss, who works for the Washington Post, snagged an interview with the president and asked him about the discrepancy. Obama agreed with Cook's account. So why did he make up the anecdote? He told Maraniss it was a "useful theme to make about sort of the interactions that I had in the relationships with white girlfriends." How convenient — especially when the overall theme of his bitter memoir is white racism. Obama told another whopper in his autobiography. He wrote that while thumbing through a copy of Life magazine, he came across a story about a black man who underwent chemical treatments to lighten his skin. He claims he recoiled in horror at the photo of the bleached man, who looked like "an albino." Then he says he got so angry that "I felt my face and neck get hot." He was upset that blackness was so condemned in America that a black man would resort to making himself white. Only, that story wasn't true, either. Life never published such an article. Obama also grossly exaggerates his own battles with racism while attending a mostly white prep school in Honolulu. He wrote that he commiserated with his only black friend, a character named "Ray." The Chicago Tribune tracked down the real guy, a half-Japanese Hawaiian named Keith Kakugawa, and found they never even talked about race. "The idea that his biggest struggle was race is (bull)," Kakugawa said. After graduating from Columbia University, Obama says he took a Manhattan job in an unidentified "consulting house to international corporations," where he acted as "a spy behind enemy lines." In fact, he worked for a small newsletter publisher. Countless other tall tales are in his book. At the same time, he disguised the identity of several radicals with whom he closely associated, including members of the Communist Party under FBI investigation. Whenever questions about Obama and his enigmatic past bubble up, the Obama camp refers to his memoir, which he wrote as a 34-year-old lawyer, as if it were a transparent and candid account of his life and not the tissue of lies that it's turning out to be. In the 2008 race, for example, Michelle Obama brushed off questions about her husband's ties to Bill Ayers and other anti-American radicals by using that very tactic. "People have gotten to know Barack — he's written a book," she said. Mrs. Obama added that he's "been thoroughly vetted. And I think people know Barack Obama." In fact, the vetting of this president has just begun. And we're learning only now, after he's been in office almost four years, that he has a disturbing habit of telling stories he wants the public to hear, while concealing information and connections he doesn't want it to know. What else is Obama making up? Or hiding? If he plays fast and loose with the facts in his own autobiography, how can voters trust he's telling the truth about national issues? Or about his agenda? -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
