Free Republic

David Remnick, an Obama biographer and the editor of the New Yorker, said this morning on national TV that President Obama is disappointed in the world: (Remnick on Morning Joe) "The profile [of President Obama] that I published in the New Yorker was somebody that eerily, eerily seemed to be claiming himself--it was a sense of not giving up, but of deep frustration--that was the profile that I published in the New Yorker. Somebody frustrated and disappointed," said Remnick, who has proven to be deeply sympathetic to this president. "And that's what's frustrating to me sometimes about Obama is that...

Contradicting the faultless, albeit far-fetched image he has of himself, Barack Obama is a man harassed by truth. That's why, judging from his inability to accept personal responsibility, Barack Obama must be living in a constant state of agitated cognitive dissonance. The late Leon Festinger is the social psychologist who proposed the theory of cognitive dissonance. According to Festinger, until the person suffering with perceptual disharmony can find a way to justify wrong actions and decisions, it's impossible to achieve a calm mental state, especially when those wrong actions and decisions challenge the way the cognitively dissonant individual sees himself.That's...

There was a particularly disturbing segment during Howard Kurtz’ Reliable Sources program on CNN this weekend. Host Howard Kurtz was interviewing David Remnick, Editor-in-Chief of the New Yorker, who was “pimping” his new book “The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama.” Kurtz asked Remnick a question about the love affair between the mainstream press and Obama during the campaign to which he answered the media was in love with the narrative of having an African-American win the presidency and that was a legitimate approach for a journalist to have.

At the beginning of March 2004, almost nobody outside the narrow world of Chicago politics had heard of Barack Hussein Obama. He was 42, a state legislator and the author of a well-received but by no means bestselling memoir, Dreams from My Father. Then he won the Democratic primary for the safe senatorial seat of Illinois. Four months later, he delivered his galvanising keynote address to the Democratic national convention (“there is not a liberal America and a conservative America; there is a United States of America”). That November he was duly elected senator: the only African-American in Congress’s upper...

The blogosphere abhors a vacuum. So when the mainstream media (MSM) leave holes in a given narrative -- in this case, the biography of the president -- bloggers individually, incrementally, and indefatigably strive to fill in the blanks -- sometimes successfully, sometimes less so. In his comprehensive, 600-plus-page biography of Barack Obama titled The Bridge, New Yorker editor David Remnick lays down the baseline of what the mainstream media know about the president -- or at least what they want us to know.

Seymour M. Hersh, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter now writing for The New Yorker magazine, was asked Tuesday at the University of Michigan why Sen. John Kerry isn't easily leading the presidential race over George W. Bush when the war in Iraq is going so badly. "I think one thing you have to face up to is the fact there are roughly 70 million people in America who do not believe in evolution - and those are Bush supporters," said Hersh, who is up front about his support for Kerry. Hersh's observations about the presidential campaign, the war in Iraq...

In an effort to galvanize the message Kerry wants to deliver in the time remaining, he convened a powerful roster of journalists and columnists in the New York City apartment of Al Franken last Thursday. The gathering could not properly be called a meeting or a luncheon. It was a trial. The journalists served as prosecuting attorneys, jury and judge. The crowd I joined in Franken’s living room was comprised of: Al Franken and his wife Franni; Rick Hertzberg, senior editor for the New Yorker; David Remnick, editor for the New Yorker; Jim Kelly, managing editor for Time Magazine; Howard...