Conservatives must really be sared of Barack Obama’s potential. We’ve seen them falsely claim he went to a madrassa. They’ve obsessed over how his name sounds like Osama and over his grad school parking tickets. It gets worse. We have positive proof that Barack Obama has confused Life Magazine with Time!
Articles attacking Obama yesterday questioned his account of an article Obama recalled from his childhood. Richard Cohen wrote in The Washington Post:
I tell you this story to suggest something about Barack Obama. In his memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” he recounts a watershed moment of his own — a “revelation,” a “violent” awakening, an incident that “permanently altered” his “vision.” Twice he tells how as a 9-year-old he went to the U.S. Embassy in Indonesia (a country where his mother had taken him to live) and came across a Life magazine article about a black man who had tried to whiten his skin through some sort of chemical process. The result was a disaster.
“I felt my face and neck get hot,” Obama wrote. “My stomach knotted; the type began to blur on the page.”
The child had, for the first time, confronted racism and its hideous consequences.
Only there is no such issue of Life magazine. So says the Chicago Tribune, which has gone through the Obama memoir with commendable thoroughness…
When the Tribune told Obama that Life magazine historians could find no such story, Obama suggested it might have been Ebony — “or it might have been . . . who knows what it was?” (The Tribune says Ebony’s archivists also could not come up with such an article.) Indeed, the memory of the event/non-event is so firmly planted in Obama’s mind that it seems to have become an emotional truth for him, far more powerful than an intellectual truth.
Yes, it turns out Obama was wrong. This article was not in Life, or even Ebony. It was a long article in Time on race issues which included this passage (emphasis mine):
There is a trend among Negro coeds and career girls to wear their hair “natural” instead of attempting to unkink it by “conking”—rinsing it with lye and binding it with handkerchiefs. Yet for every Negro who flaunts his identity, a hundred try to camouflage it. Advertisements in the Negro magazines still hymn Nadinola skin bleach: “Lightens and brightens skin.”
Obama might have also been thinking of an article in Look which is described in this diary at Daily Kos.
I’m sure the right wing noise machine will continue to try to spread the claim that Obama has lied about his past, just as they invent their stories that Al Gore lied by saying he invented the internet or that John Kerry lied about his Vietnam record. As their smears get increaslingly lame, it is also clear that the real liars in American politics are those in the right wing noise machine which spread all these lies about Democrats.
