Replies

Maraniss may be trying to carry the water for the Obama line when he places young Barack at a Columbia gym doing his workouts in the early 1980s. The implication would be that he was indeed enrolled at the university during that time frame, whereas that fact remains doubtful, due primarily to the complete lack of corroboration from putative classmates and the lack of a transcript.

Maraniss definitely leans to the left, having worked for the WaPo and written a less than scathing biography of Bill Clinton. Therefore, it would be incumbent upon Ben Shapiro to carefully vet Maraniss' material when doing a piece like this.

There have been so many lies and distortions about Obama's background coming from the MSM that a conservative writer like Shapiro risks his own credibility by quoting Maraniss at length on this subject.