“The British Turned Me Into A Newt!!”
But, er, um, I got better…
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.
…In a 2008 interview, Sarah Obama claimed that he was ‘whipped every morning and evening’ by the British. ‘They would sometimes squeeze his testicles with metal rods. They also pierced his nails and buttocks with a sharp pin, with his hands and legs tied together. He was lucky to survive. Some of his fellow inmates were mutilated with castration pliers and beaten to death with clubs.’
But Maraniss, who researched Obama’s life in Kenya, Indonesia, Hawaii and the mainland United States, found that there were ‘no remaining records of any detention, imprisonment, or trial of Hussein Onyango Obama’. He interviewed five people who knew Obama’s grandfather, who died in 1979, who ‘doubted the story or were certain it did not happen’.
…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.
Shocked and stunned I am.
There is no “there” there with this guy.
We are hosed.
Life, Makes Ya Barf, Media, Morality, People, Politics | Mr. Bingley | 
June 20, 2012 8:15 am
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Maybe he left out that alien abduction because the little creatures were the wrong color.
There is a ‘there’ there – it’s Bam at the center, Bam at the periphery, and Bam everywhere in between.
This is one of the disasters of victimology that takes time to realize… namely, if you are insufficiently victimized, then you lose your standing and authority. Therefore, you have to craft enough incidents in your own life to satisfy the minimum requirements, or you’re not “authentic.”
It’s pernicious, and it exacts a huge cost on so many people – and especially for actual victims. (cf Fauxcahontas bumping a qualified minority when she’s as WASP as it gets) Anyone who’s genuinely disadvantaged but shuts their mouth and gets on with life has to overcome not only their own difficulties, but the active resistance of those who profit by just sitting back and riding the grievance gravy train.