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In August 2008, back when it mattered, the Washington Post ran a 10,000-word article by its Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter David Maraniss titled, “Though Obama Had to Leave to Find Himself, It Is Hawaii That Made His Rise Possible.” For reasons that will soon become clear, Maraniss should have excused himself from this assignment once he discovered the identity of the man in Hawaii who made that rise possible. Barack Obama referred to this man in his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, as “Frank.” If there was any mystery to Frank’s identity, Gerald Horne, a leftist scholar from the University...

The Talk Shows March 8th, 2015 Guests to be interviewed today on major television talk shows: FOX NEWS SUNDAY (Fox Network): Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga. ; former Gov. Mike Huckabee, R-Ark.MEET THE PRESS (NBC): Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Claire McCaskill, D-Mo.; Lewis.FACE THE NATION (CBS): Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; Sens. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Tim Scott, R-S.C.; Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C.; Benjamin Crump, lawyer for the family of Michael Brown, the unarmed black 18-year-old shot to death by a white police officer in Ferguson.THIS WEEK (ABC): Mayor James Knowles of Ferguson, Missouri;...

David Maraniss, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Barack Obama: The Story, is getting testy. And it is not hard to understand why. The Washington Post diva spent the last four years on his career book, released it in the heart of a heated re-election season, got the kind of exposure a Kardashian would envy, and now finds the book heading for the remainder racks weeks after its release. Oy vey! As of this writing, the book ranks 1,696 on Amazon's bestseller list. By contrast, Edward Klein's unfriendly Obama tome, The Amateur, has outsold just every book this summer not centered on...

There are Obama doubters and haters out there who claim with righteous anger that they are “vetting” the president, something they say the mainstream media never did. Some of them have said that my new biography — unwittingly, they argue, for I am too dumb to understand what my research has unearthed — proves that Barack Obama’s defining memoir is phony and that his entire life is a fraud. My intent is not to defend Obama or his book; he can take care of himself, and I have my own questions about “Dreams From My Father,” which I make clear...

In his book, Barack Obama: The Story, David Maraniss is remarkably detailed about things that have nothing to do with The Story (Betty Davis' opinion of a film, how a letter was handled in Kenya, what President Johnson said to Bill Moyers) but is inexplicably incurious about many things that are very important to The Story. Maraniss, in an interview on the June 18 Today Show, stated that Barack Obama's book, Dreams from My Father, was "literature," adding, "There's a big difference between memoir and biography." So big a difference that Ben Smith of Buzzfeed counted "38 instances in which...

Understandably, the publishers of David Maraniss’ much discussed new biography, “Barack Obama: The Story,” released advanced copies to mainstream reviewers. (Full disclosure here, Simon & Schuster also published my book “Deconstructing Obama.”) Spinning Maraniss’ revelations as favorably as they could, at least a few reviewers claimed that his book would at least put the birther issue to rest given his interviews with the health professionals attending the birth. In fact, the Maraniss book does quite the opposite. Although I remain agnostic about the where and when of Obama’s birth, Maraniss’ account makes me all the more suspicious of the official...

Conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh said during his radio program on Wednesday that David Maraniss, the author of a book entitled "Barack Obama: the Story," is “in crisis” because “the right wing” is using his book to point out “all the things in Obama's autobiography which are not true.” Limbaugh stated that Maraniss is “vetting Obama and doesn't realize it” by “documenting lies and falsehoods, and as far he's concerned, all he's doing is getting the record straight” by “poking holes” in information from the president's book, "Dreams From My Father."The radio host turned to comments the author made...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Let's see. David Maraniss. David Maraniss has this book on Obama, and he's upset. Maraniss is not happy over how the right wing is using his book. What Maraniss is doing -- and I don't think he realizes it because he's angry at what's happening. He's angry at the reaction to his book. What he's doing is pointing out all the things in Obama's autobiographies which are not true. He talked about Obama's great basketball talents in high school yesterday that Obama wrote about in his book. It turns out he wasn't a special player. Maraniss is...

"Exclusive: Jack Cashill notes Maraniss book puts lie to O's 'improbable love' claim"Excerpt....In all the talk about David Maraniss’ new book, “Barack Obama: The Story,” the chattering classes seem to have overlooked the most significant of Maraniss’ revelations, namely that the story on which Obama based his 2008 candidacy is “received myth, not the truth.” “My parents shared not only an improbable love,” said Obama famously in his 2004 Democratic Convention keynote, “they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation.” This concept of multicultural romance shaped his persona and his campaigns. At the 2008 Democratic Convention in...

On CSPAN's Book TV Sunday, David Maraniss revealed a photo of Obama's pot smoking 'Choom Gang' and shared some of the information he learned about while writing his book. "The Choom Gang, that's what they did," Marannis said, revealing the photo and talking about the gang's practice of "total absorption" of marijuana smoke while sitting in a car. "That was part of his existence during that period."

...the Maraniss book published last week in Vanity Fair reveals a portrait of Obama that might have enriched the voters' understanding of him in the 2008... The excerpt focuses on Obama's brief time in New York after his graduation from Columbia University. The son of a Kenyan father and an American expatriate mother, Obama emerges as a man questioning whether he viewed himself, or wanted to be viewed by others, as an American. Not in a citizenship sense -- Obama was born in the United States and that was that -- but in the sense of how he saw the...