A new biography of Barack Obama has established that his grandfather was not, as is related in the President’s own memoir, detained by the British in Kenya and found that claims that he was tortured were a fabrication.
'Barack Obama: The Story' by David Maraniss catalogues dozens of instances in which Obama deviated significantly from the truth in his book 'Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance'. The 641-page book punctures the carefully-crafted narrative of Obama’s life . . .
Maraniss also casts a sceptical eye on Obama’s grandmother’s tales of racism in Kansas, doubting whether she was ever chastised for addressing a black janitor as ‘Mister’ or ridiculed for playing with a black girl.
Obama himself, Maraniss finds, deliberately distorted elements of his own life to fit into a racial narrative. The author writes that Obama presents himself in his memoir as ‘blacker and more disaffected’ than he really was.
The memoir ‘accentuates characters drawn from black acquaintances who played lesser roles 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’.
In the forward to his memoir, Obama wrote that ‘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’.
But Maraniss writes that Obama’s book is ‘literature and memoir, not history and autobiography’ and concludes: ‘The character creations and rearrangements of the book are not merely a matter of style, devices of compression, but are also substantive.’
Writing about his schooldays, Obama created a friend called Regina, a symbol of the authentic black American experience that Obama yearns for.
Maraniss found, however, that Regina was based on Caroline Boss, a white student leader at Occidental College. Regina was the name of Boss’s Swiss grandmother.
The book also notes that Obama removed two white roommates in Los Angeles and New York from his story. Obama himself told Maraniss in a 90-minute interview that a racial incident involving a New York girlfriend had in fact happened in Chicago.
A tale of the father of Obama’s Indonesian stepfather Soewarno Martodihardjo being killed by Dutch soldiers as he fought for Indonesian independence turns out to be ‘a concocted myth in almost all respects’, Maraniss finds . . .
According to the book, both Obama’s father and his paternal grandfather were abusive towards women and Maraniss finds that Obama’s story that he was abandoned by his father when he was two was false – in fact, Obama’s mother fled to Washington state a year earlier, possibly because she was being beaten.
A character in Obama’s memoir called Ray, portrayed as a symbol of young blackness, is in fact based on a fellow pupil who was half Japanese, part native American and part black and was not a close friend.
‘In the memoir Barry and Ray, could be heard complaining about how rich white haole [upper class white Hawaiian] girls would never date them. In fact, neither had much trouble in that regard.’
Obama notes of his own grandfather that he was apt to create ‘history to conform with the image he wished for himself’ . . .
The blogosphere has reported the fact that there never was an Obama family because Ann Dunham fled to Seattle to attend classes at the University of Washington within weeks of Obama's birth. Maraniss' book finally acknowledges this point ignored by the mainstream media. Maraniss' flattering reporting on Obama during the 2008 presidential election conveniently ignored many of the facts he now accepts as truth. Even Maraniss' stinging rebuke of the fabricated claims in Obama's autobiography doesn't go far enough. Jack Cashill and others have long ago established that Obama didn't even write the book; it was actually ghost written by Obama's long-time terrorist pal, Bill Ayers. My guess is that the Obama administration will have long come and gone before the American news media will ever get around to vetting Obama.
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