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Selective Outrage (11 February 2023)

February 12, 2023

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I, for one, believe that Marjorie Taylor Greene showed exquisite taste in her attire at President Biden’s State of the Union address.

 

 

Where else if not at the U.S. Congress should someone show up as a Madame?  But, as always, George Santos grabbed the headlines.  This time Mitt Romney was agitated by his presence.  The last we heard from Mitt, he said the half of this country that is not making it comprises whining do-nothing parasites.  Alas, like Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” slip, the Losers struck back on election day.  But it’s the woke media that has been most exercised at Mr. Santos because – OMG! – he’s a serial liar.  The N.Y. Times broke this extraordinary story a few weeks ago and just can’t let go of it.  Shocking as this may sound, Santos is not the only serially lying politician.  The secular saint of woke media like the Times is, of course, Barack Obama.  Consider the reception of his book Dreams from My Father:

 

Toni Morrison, saying the book was “quite extraordinary,” praised “his ability to reflect on this extraordinary mesh of experiences that he has had … and to really meditate on that…—these things that you don’t often see … in the routine political memoir biography.” Philip Roth said he had found Dreams from My Father “well done and very persuasive and memorable.”  The book “may be the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician,” wrote Time columnist Joe Klein.  Michiko Kakutani, the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for The New York Times, described it as “the most evocative, lyrical and candid autobiography written by a future president.”  In the Guardian, literary critic Robert McCrum wrote that Obama had “executed an affecting personal memoir with grace and style, narrating an enthralling story with honesty, elegance and wit, as well as an instinctive gift for storytelling.” In 2011, Time magazine listed the book on its top 100 non-fiction books written in English since 1923.

 

David Garrow is a respected historian who has written a standard biography of Martin Luther King. To judge by his exhaustive 1,500 page biography of Obama (including 300 double-column pages of endnotes), Dreams from My Father is a book-length version of Santos’s c.v.  It was “not a memoir or an autobiography,” Garrow concluded, “it was instead, in multitudinous ways, without any question a work of historical fiction” (emphasis in original).  The Guardians of Woke Faith over at the Times were none too pleased by Garrow’s findings.  Here’s Kakutani:

 

Rising Star, the voluminous 1,460-page biography of Barack Obama by David J. Garrow, is a dreary slog of a read: a bloated, tedious and — given its highly intemperate epilogue — ill-considered book that is in desperate need of editing, and way more exhausting than exhaustive…. The reader interested in Barack Obama’s life would do well to … go back to Obama’s own eloquent memoir.

 

And those interested in George Santos’s life would do well to go back to his c.v.