Discussing media scrutiny over unsubstantiated claims that Dr. Ben Carson has made in his memoirs, Hardball host Chris Matthews tonight pontificated about the importance of fact-checking one's own book to make sure everything is kosher:
MSNBC
Hardball
Nov. 9, 2015; 7:12 p.m. EasternCHRIS MATTHEWS: Howard [Fineman] and I, we've written books. You know. You write a book, you've just got months, maybe years as the one I'm working on now, and you've got plenty of time to look at it in print, a lot of time before it actually gets published. A lot of time to go over it. Make sure-- you start making these claims, you better damn well know they're true. Now, maybe you know you can't substantiate them right away. But they'd better be damn true, not sort of true.
Video: @hardball_chris re: Carson: when you write memoir, better be damn true. No such critique of #Obama pic.twitter.com/hlFRR1xAUC
— Ken Shepherd (@KenShepherd) November 10, 2015
By that standard, Barack Obama wasn't on the level with his now-infamous "composite girlfriend" in his memoir Dreams From My Father. A search of Nexis around the time this story blew up in 2012 shows hand-wringing on Hardball about the revelation.
My colleagues Tim Graham and Brent Bozell exhaustively examined how the liberal media ignored Barack Obama's lies about his life story in his own writings in their book Collusion. Graham and Bozell also excerpted a relevant portion for a blog post in July 2013 headlined, "The Audacity of Myth: How the Media Ignored Obama's Lies About His Own Biography and Memoir."
That post, linked above, is well worth the read. Here's an excerpt:
David Maraniss of The Washington Post was another reporter flying all over the world trying to separate the real Obama from the phony memoir of Dreams -- but in the friendliest possible way. Maraniss told Vanity Fair that Obama's memoir had value despite its pack of lies: "I say that his memoir is a remarkably insightful exploration of his internal struggle, but should not be read as rigorous factual history. It is not, and the president knew that when he wrote it and knows it now."
This was a bombshell. Maraniss had spent months exploring Obama's past and held a prestigious editor's post at the dominant paper in the nation's capital, and was overseeing campaign coverage as Obama faced a difficult re-election. But the bombshell never exploded.
In mid-June, his book Barack Obama: The Story came out. On June 5, deep inside the paper, New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani noticed several factual problems with Obama's memoir. She called the book a "forensic deconstruction" of Obama.
For example, Obama wrote about "a woman in New York that I loved." But while the physical description of this character closely resembles a white Obama girlfriend named Genevieve Cook, Maraniss wrote Obama "distorted her attitudes and some of their experiences, emphasizing his sense that they came from different worlds."
Maraniss relayed that during an interview at the White House on November 10, 2011, Obama acknowledged his description of his New York girlfriend was actually a "compression" of events "that occurred at separate times with several different girlfriends."
Obama didn't just dump his old girlfriends. He then added insult to injury by blurring them into a fictional composite. If a memoir can't be honest about something as trivial as " a women in New York that I loved," how can it be considered accurate with matters that are profound?The glossy magazine Vanity Fair published an excerpt from Maraniss, but didn't focus very seriously on the "compression." They were fascinated by excerpts from Cook's diary, and letters Obama wrote to another white girlfriend, Alex McNear. On May 2, ABC anchor Diane Sawyer swooned as she quoted Obama's letters, and pretended it was somehow a "peril" for ABC to discover them and praise them.
"One of the perils of being President: Everything you ever wrote will become public. And today, Barack Obama, age 22-long before he met Michelle-new letters and diary entries revealed in Vanity Fair from a biography out soon," Sawyer announced.
"He had college girlfriends, two women… Genevieve Cook and Alex McNear. And in a love letter to McNear, the President writes adoringly about life in New York. Quote, 'Moments trip gently along over here. Snow caps the bushes in unexpected ways. Birds shoot and spin like balls of sound. My feet hum over the dry walks.' Oh, we were all so romantic when we were young. The book relies on a trove of letters and journal entries that Obama and his friends created during the 1980s."
So much for "peril." Sawyer and ABC never showed the slightest interest in Obama compressing and mangling his college sweethearts in his book.
There was more distortion. Obama also told a story about taking a girlfriend to a "very angry play" by a black playwright and she came out "talking about why black people were angry all the time. I said it was a matter of remembering-nobody asks why Jews remember the Holocaust, I think I said -- and she said that's different, and I said it wasn't, and she said that anger was just a dead end. And we had a big fight, right in front of the theater."
Maraniss reported, "None of this happened with Genevieve." Cook said they attended the theater just once together, to see the British actress Billie Whitelaw performing from the work of the Irish playwright Samuel Beckett. The one time they were in the midst of a black audience was a trip to the movies in Brooklyn to see Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop. Cook told Maraniss, "I was the only white person in the audience," and "It was such a wonderful, uplifting, mind-blowing experience."
There was no fight. There was no crying in the car (neither person had a car). There was no scene where Obama's girlfriend asked about angry black people.
Maraniss asked Obama about this at the White House. Obama acknowledged the scene did not happen with Cook. "That was not her," he said. "That was an example of compression. I thought that was a useful theme to make about sort of the interactions I had in the relationship. And so that occupies, what, two paragraphs in the book? My attitude was it would be dishonest for me not to touch on that at all."
Stop. Rewind. He's saying "it would be dishonest of me" not to make up a story about a black-white lovers' quarrel? To Obama, real life was merely raw material for manufacturing the "larger truth" of his mythology. His story was false -- period.
In another stunning passage from the same chapter of the Maraniss book, a passage that Vanity Fair did not excerpt -- perhaps because it wasn't about Obama's love life-Obama describes his brief tenure after graduation from Columbia at a place called Business International, which produced newsletters and updates for corporations seeking to do business abroad. Obama boasted, "I had my own office, my own secretary, money in the bank. Sometimes, coming out an interview with Japanese financiers or German bond traders, I would catch my reflection in the elevator doors-see myself in a suit and tie, a briefcase in my hand-and for a split second, I would imagine myself as a captain of industry, barking out orders, closing the deal, before I remembered who it was that I wanted to be and felt pangs of guilt for my lack of resolve."
Maraniss found these recollections were "seen as distortions and misrepresentations by many of the people who had worked with him." They said Obama had no secretary, and his office was the size of a cubicle, barely large enough to fit a desk. The dress code was informal, and people in his position rarely wore suits. "He dressed like a college kid," said his supervisor Lou Celi.
Ralph Diaz, the company's vice president for publications, thought Obama was embellishing his role for dramatic effect "in a book that reads more like a novel." He said "Obama worked at a very, very low position there. . . . The part about seeing his reflection in the elevator doors? There were no reflections there. . . . He was not in this high, talking-to-Swiss-bankers kind of role. He was in the back rooms checking things on the phone."
Another colleague characterized it with equal distaste: "He retells the story as the temptation of Christ . . . the young idealistic would-be community organizer who gets a nice suit and barely escapes moving into the big mansion with the white folks."
In an interview with Vanity Fair, Maraniss admitted that he bent his usual rules to make his interview with the president more advantageous. What's the harm in a little collusion?
