Barack Obama, The Story — an extraordinarily detailed look at President Obama's early life by The Washington Post's David Maraniss — hit bookstores this week, and conservative critics say it's full of evidence that Obama fabricated important parts of his best-selling 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father. Perhaps most notably, it seems Obama was less than honest about the death of his step-grandfather. (The president's claim that his relative was killed while fighting Dutch troops in Indonesia "was a concocted myth," Maraniss says. In reality, he died hanging drapes.) But while Obama certainly took liberties with the facts, Maraniss, who has already made plenty of headlines thanks to leaked passages about Obama's old girlfriends and stoner high-school friends, argues that there is nothing "venal" about Obama's memoir. Was Obama just employing creative license, or do the discrepancies call his honesty into question?
Maraniss has exposed Obama as a liar: Obama peddled his book "as autobiography, not literature," says Paul Mirengoff at Power Line. And let's face it: He lied. It doesn't matter if, as Maraniss says, the future president didn't trample the facts for personal gain. If Obama is willing to tell a whopper as big as the tall tale about his step-grandfather, I bet he'd be willing to say anything "in the name of racial politics."
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