Barack Obama’s Selma Truthiness

Randy at RightWinged and Hot Air‘s AllahPundit catch Barack Obama re-inventing his family history while pandering to the crowd at the Selma March commemoration.

What’s particularly odd about this is that Obama’s story already gives him plenty of bona fides at Selma. Why lie?

FILED UNDER: 2008 Election, Race and Politics, ,
James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is Professor and Department Head of Security Studies at Marine Corps University's Command and Staff College. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Comments

  1. Edgardo says:

    A necessary but not sufficient condition to be a politician is to be a liar. To get elected they have to sell lemons. Unfortunately the demand side of the market is full of irrational voters (cf. Bryan Caplan, forthcoming).

  2. Markwell says:

    Portion of comment in violation of site policies deleted.

    He was obviously referring to the entire civil rights movement when he spoke of his parents. After 8 years of GWB mangling every other sentence it seems strange that such an obvious (and true) statement by Obama gets declared a “lie.”

    His statement may have been innaccurate in a purely technical sense, but it was in no way a “lie.”

  3. Tano says:

    I agree with Markwell. It seems rather ridiculous to call this a “lie”. HE was obviously speaking of the effect of the civil rights movement on his family life, using Selma as an example of the movement as a whole.

    Is there any surpise that you get over-the-top nonsense from those kind of sites?