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He lies, she lies, they lie, they all lie, and I’m going to feed the ducks!

‘Dreams From My Father’s’ literary license
Comments (19) By BYRON TAU | 5/2/12 11:14 AM EDT David Maraniss, writing in Vanity Fair, reports that President Obama seems to have taken some degree of literary license in his memoir “Dreams From My Father” — with one character in particular, Obama’s mysterious New York girlfriend.

In one chapter, Obama describes a fight with a woman he describes only as his ‘New York girlfriend’ after seeing a play by a black playwright, after which Obama’s girlfriend asked why “black people were so angry all the time?”

Maraniss, who located the woman that Obama had a long relationship with in New York City, reports that the incident did not happen — and that Obama took a degree of literary license in stitching events and characters together to make his thematic points work better:

When asked about this decades later, during a White House interview, Obama acknowledged that the scene did not happen with Genevieve. “It is an incident that happened,” he said. But not with her. He would not be more specific, but the likelihood is that it happened later, when he lived in Chicago. “That was not her,” he said. “That was an example of compression I was very sensitive in my book not to write about my girlfriends, partly out of respect for them.”

It would be hard to accuse Obama of painting an idealized portrait of himself in “Dreams” — he does, after all, admit to things (like drug use) and tackle subjects (like race and identity) that most budding politicians would gladly steer clear of when writing a memoir. But it underscores how, in writing “Dreams,” Obama had literary ambitions that seem to have sometimes exceeded the literal truth.

It’s an interpretation that Maraniss largely backs, telling Vanity Fair “I say that his memoir is a remarkably insightful exploration of his internal struggle but should not be read as rigorous factual history.”

UPDATE, via Dylan Byers: Obama disclosed that some of his characters were composites. In the introduction to “Dreams from My Father,” he writes that “some of the characters that appear are composites of people I’ve known.”

When asked about this decades later, during a White House interview, Obama acknowledged that the scene did not happen with Genevieve. “It is an incident that happened,” he said. But not with her. He would not be more specific, but the likelihood is that it happened later, when he lived in Chicago. “That was not her,” he said. “That was an example of compression I was very sensitive in my book not to write about my girlfriends, partly out of respect for them.”
Yes, well, we look at the "photo" of Genevieve and a male with a white hand and Obama's hundred-thirty-percent-sized head, and conclude the same: it didn't happen this way.
A conclusion reached by David Maraniss. As Rush Limbaugh phrased it, Maraniss tried to help Obama with the problems of Dreams and succeeded in demonstrating Obama "made stuff up."
From Cashill's analysis, it's clear it was Bill Ayers who made stuff up.
From years of scores of people poring over the records, finding forgeries, gaps, overwrites, erasures, et cetera, it's clear the record can be dismissed, that Barack Hussein Obama Jr. was not the father of this legend.
That Stanley Ann Dunham wasn't in any hospital giving birth to him.
That Frank Marshall Davis was mentor from age nine through eighteen, but not the father.
That the resemblance to Malcolm Little aka Malcolm X aka El Hajj Malik Al-Shabazz is greater than to either Barack Hussein Obama Sr. or to Frank Marshall Davis when we look--not at a single photo of any of these--at all the evidence.
We can agree that the current president isn't who he says he is, that he hides records of Occidental, Columbia, Harvard for good reason, that there are telling gaps in the record with bushels of protesting-too-much patches.
Zero is perfectly capable of acting to further Islamo-Communist ends without having to possess particular genes.
He's indoctrinated, trained, groomed, placed, and prompted to perform for the benefit of his sponsors.
They are enemies of America, and of freedom, as is he.