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| Barack Obama smoking pot? |
His life story was published in great detail with the publication of his 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.
The book, which believe it or not, won critical acclaim and rose to No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list, recounted a sort of complex narcissistic tale that is by now familiar to most Americans.
His book Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance is Obama's egotistic story of being black in America.
But more accurately, his book is about having a promiscuous white mother from Kansas, a bigamist black father from Kenya where he already had one family, smoking pot, doing drugs, and living the life of a spoiled rich kid privilaged beyond his imagination.
That's right. The life of a rich kid.
Like it or not, both men known as Barack Hussien Obama and Barry Sorento did not work until after becoming a Community Organizer in Chicago.
So how do you do that? How do you attend some of the most expensive schools in the country - starting in High School with one of the most expensive Private Schools in the entire state of Hawaii?
His book talks about his mother's re-marriage to, and eventual split from, Obama's Indonesian Muslim stepfather. And yes, it talks about being raised as a Muslim until the age of 10 in a school in Jakarta, then at the age of 10 was raised with his white grandparents who lived in Hawaii.
It talks about Grandparents who sent him to the most expensive Private School in Hawaii. Grandparents who made it possible for him to never to have worked, and who paid for him to go to Chicago.
His book talks talks about his supposedly attending Occidental College and Columbia University, which he himself has never shown transcripts for attending, and there supposedly finding his intellectual "roots" in the black world view of life.
In Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance there is supposedly numerous romances, some of them bi-racial with white women. He was supposedly the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review in his book, although strangely none of the law students who attended Harvard can remember him there.
And of course, in his book, he writes about his exploits as a Community Organizer and Chicago lawyer which he felt qualified him to be President of the United States.
Obama now openly admits changing some people's names in his book. Now many Obama biographers have found his book a combination short on fact and heavy on fiction.
Supposed some of his experiences are real. Some of the characters in his book are supposedly real-life individuals. But other experiences and characters are certainly made up, completely convoluted. Yes, they're just lies!
Now comes the publication last month of, Barack Obama: The Story, which is a deeply researched, 600-page study of the president's ancestry and early life by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Washington Post editor David Maraniss.
The result of Maraniss work is an in depth scrutiny that should be attached to all of our presidents. It offers a look into how much of the life story of this self-made man may have been made up. Yes, Maraniss proves the Obama is a liar!
By some counts, Barack Obama: The Story presents more than three-dozen instances of material discrepancy where Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance fails to give accurate facts as researchers have found them.
Case in point: Maraniss confirmed that Mr. Obama's mother, Ann Dunham, left his father, Barack Obama, Sr., "a volatile bigamist," and not the other way around, as related in the president's book.
The President's book also related the tale of Obama's paternal grandfather, Hussein Onyango, who was said to have been detained and tortured in a prison outside Nairobi for six months because of his brave defiance of British colonialists.
But after a half-dozen interviews and other research, Maraniss deemed the tale "unlikely."
Maraniss did not respond to several calls requesting an interview, but Fox News caught up with him outside a Washington book signing.
"I think there's a difference between a memoir and the serious, rigorous factual history of a biography," he said. "Some of what he did was the result of mythologies that were passed along from his family, and some were for the purposes of advancing themes in his book which had more to do with finding his racial identity."
In an Oval Office interview prior to the publication of The Story, Maraniss handed the president a copy of Maraniss's introduction, which conveyed the degree to which The Story would be challenging various scenes in Obama's memoir.
The president confirmed Maraniss's research and offered an explanation for those instances when he had chosen to employ an approach in his book which were less than factual - in other words, when he was not honest and lied.
Gerald Early, a noted professor of English literature and Black-American studies at Washington University in St. Louis, agreed. "It really doesn't matter if he made up stuff," Early told Fox News.
"I mean, after all, it's like you going to a psychiatrist and you make up stuff, and the psychiatrist can still psycho-analyze you because they're your lies." he said.
That's right! This guy Geral Early, who is supposedly a "noted professor" of English literature and Black studies, believes that it doesn't matter if Obama sold his book as a factual portrayal of his life - or whether he lied or not!
This is the kind of bullshit that drives me nuts! If it were George W. Bush, the same guy would probably be screaming "Liar!"
David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker magazine and author of a previous biography, The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama, published in 2010, judged Obama's book to be "a mixture of verifiable fact, recollection, recreation, invention, and artful shaping."
Remnick concluded that Obama wanted his life story to fit into a long tradition of African-American literature: a "narrative of ascent" discernible in early slave memoirs right up through contemporary classics like Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952) and The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965).
So in other words, according to this guy all Black memoirs are lies? I sure hope not!
Fact is, Obama's early life was one of wealth and privilege, - ripe with recreational drug use, a Hawaii upbringing which was made financially comfortable by his white grandparents, and enrollment in some of the most elite private schools and universities in the nation.
To say that his silver spoon life fits in with some sort of true and honest agony of an aggrieved black man or woman is too much to ask for - even in black literature.
"Obama seems to sense this problem and, at the very start of his book, darkens his canvas as well as he can," Remnick wrote.
In other words, Obama tried to make himself sound more black since he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and subsequently couldn't really relate to black Americans who truly have had it rough growing up.
Imagine this for a moment.
Black people in the inter-cities of America do have it rough. Their educational systems are horrible. Their family structures are usually not what they should or supposed to be. They face higher unemployment than others in our nation. Their lives are surrounded with terrible influences such as drugs, violence, crime, no role models. They live with a total lack of morality.
So what did Obama do knowing that he faced absolutely none of these problems growing up in Hawaii?
Well, bottom line, he knew when writing his story that it would not fly - so he lied!
He wanted to be "ghetto" so he lied about how horrible his life was, his so-called supposed life changing events, and his awaking as a "black" person. Too bad he never admitted to having a great education, not having to ever hold a job, or living a privileged life from the age of 10 to 18 - far better than most who live in Hawaii.
He didn't do it because it wouldn't have convenient to do so when he wrote his "Oh poor me" book.
Maraniss actually confirmed this in his book The Story.
For example, the back story offered for one of the now famous "composite characters" in Obama's Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance is a fictional black female student at Occidental - supposedly known as "Regina," who helped the young Obama embrace his Black/African heritage.
Maraniss found this to have been based in large part, but not solely, on Michelle Obama.
Although, this is really making excuses for the President Obama since he would not really meet Michelle until eight years after he had completely left Occidental for Columbia University.
And where Obama's book gives us a story of how Obama quarreled with a white girlfriend after the two attended a black theatre production in Manhattan - and that that was some sort of a supposed searing experience that supposedly was a huge turning point for Obama because it supposedly left Obama feeling more estranged from white people at the time - David Maraniss found that the incident actually happened with a different girlfriend - not in New York but in Chicago.
The lie about how the the incident happened was a startling surprise to Australian native Genevieve Cook, who confirmed to Maraniss that she was that girlfriend and they were actually in Chicago when it took place.
Cook, who provided to Maraniss the love letters she and the future president exchanged, also told Maraniss that Obama had "greatly exaggerated" in his book Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance the details of another encounter between them.
Henry Ferris, the editor who helped Obama shape his rough and overly long manuscript nearly two decades ago, told Fox News that he does not remember discussing with Obama his use of "literary license."
"I was immediately struck by how talented the writer was and what an unusual story it was," said Ferris, now a vice president and executive editor at the New York publisher William Morrow. As for the departures from the facts, Ferris cautioned that it is "not uncommon" for memorizes.
"I think there's the very good possibility ... that what he intended to do is to protect the privacy of these people he writes about in his book."
OK, I can see someone writing a story and leaving out names to protect the privacy of the people in the story - especially when it's embarrassing.
But how do you get around this next statement by Professor Geral Early, who remember is supposedly a "noted professor" of English literature and Black studies.
"Autobiographies are not really good sources if you're looking for absolute complete factual accounts of some one's life," agreed Professor Early.
"Autobiographies serve another kind of purpose for the person writing the book. I don't think it much matters whether Barack Obama has told the absolute truth in Dreams From My Father. What's important is how he wanted to construct his life."
So in other words, it's OK if someone with an inflated idea of their own importance "constructs" his or her life to be anything he or she wants it to be, pass it off as real, and then not worry about people believing it or taking it as the truth?
I don't think so! I don't know what sort of crooks and con artist that this "noted professor" is used to dealing with - but that sort of bullshit just doesn't wash with most Americans!
But now, how about all of that stuff in Obama's book about his drug use? How much of a lie is it?
Well, the meticulous biographer David Maraniss revealed President Barack Obama's early girlfriends, but also new details of Obama's smoking marijuana with his buddies at Punahou School in Hawaii.
All in all, his drug use was fairly extensive.
From Barack Obama: The Story, "When a joint was making the rounds, he often elbowed his way in, out of turn, shouted 'Intercepted!' and took an extra hit," Maraniss writes.
But Obama's buddies, who called themselves the "Choom Gang," didn't mind him messing up the rotation - supposedly because that was Hawaii.
That's not all. Maraniss writes that Obama was known for starting a trend called "TA," short for "total absorption."
"When you were with Barry and his pals, if you exhaled precious pakalolo - Hawaiian slang for marijuana, meaning 'numbing tobacco' - instead of absorbing it fully into your lungs, you were assessed a penalty and your turn was skipped the next time the joint came around."
Maraniss also describes Obama's technique of "roof hits" while hot-boxing cars. "When the pot was gone, they tilted their heads back and sucked in the last bit of smoke from the ceiling," he writes.
Classy guys, huh?
The fate of their dealer, Ray, was far more tragic than those of Obama and his extremely privileged pals. A "scorned Gay lover" killed Ray later with a ball-peen hammer.
Obama has openly bragged about his drug use, in Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, he wrote, "Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it," he writes in the memoir.
Later on doing drugs, he talked about Bill Clinton's comment that he had tried marijuana but "didn't inhale," Obama said in 2006, "That was the point, wasn't it?"
Later in Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, one of Obama's friends was arrested for drug possession and his mother, home from Indonesia, confronted him about it in his room, and all he did was walked out.
Just like any spoiled rich kid would do.
Story by Tom Correa
