©Jack Cashill
WND.com -November 7, 2015

Politico grabbed headlines on Friday with the breathtaking revelation that Ben Carson, contrary to what he either said or implied, had not been offered a scholarship to West Point.

The third paragraph contains this eye-opening revelation. “West Point, however, has no record of Carson applying, much less being extended admission.”

How does this work now? Does a reporter just write off to a college or university for data on a given student, and the university, in this case West Point, coughs up everything it has? Would that this were so.

For years the conservative media have been trying to get word one out of any of Obama’s academic institutions without success. The major media have not bothered to try.

Obama has sealed virtually all of his records for one very good reason. He crafted a persona around a series of foundational lies, the exposure of which could have doomed his candidacy in the womb.

In late October 2007, the New York Times ran a telling article headlined, “Obama’s Account of New York Years Often Differs From What Others Say.”

Given that Obama was an announced candidate for president, the Times expected Obama to welcome the chance to reconcile his account in his 1995 memoir “Dreams from My Father” with the accounts of those who knew him.

“Yet he declined repeated requests to talk about his New York years, release his Columbia transcript or identify even a single fellow student, co-worker, roommate or friend from those years.”

A campaign spokesman, Ben LaBolt, offered a conspicuously lame explanation for Obama’s reticence, “He doesn’t remember the names of a lot of people in his life.”

Lame or not, it worked. Obama’s indifference to the facts on the ground may have stunned the Times, but it did not exactly shock the Times or any other media outlet into action. They chose not to look any deeper.

In August 2008, Washington Post’s ace reporter, David Maraniss, wrote a deeply researched, 10,000-word piece on Obama’s Hawaii years. Although Obama spent 2,500 words in “Dreams” on his Communist mentor in Hawaii, Frank Marshall Davis, Maraniss did not mention him at all.

That was the least of the article’s oversights. By the time it was published, conservative bloggers knew that Obama’s origin myth was a fraud.

There was no harmonious multicultural family. Obama Sr. did not leave when Obama was two-years-old as Obama often claimed. In fact, Obama never spent a night under the same roof as his father. He and his mother had decamped to Seattle before he was a month old. There he would spend the first year of his life.

Maraniss missed all of this. He was not alone. This information escaped the four early book-length biographies I consulted, the several long-form magazine and newspaper bios I researched including Maraniss’s, the official campaign biography, and Obama himself in “Dreams.”

Not one of these accounts placed his mother and/or Obama anywhere other than Hawaii during Obama’s first two years. This was not an incidental detail.

Their exile to Washington State meant no less than that the famed multicultural marriage, the rock on which Obama built his political career, was so much quicksand.

In 2012, Maraniss made some amends in his biography, “ Barack Obama, the Story.” In his Buzzfeed review Ben Smith wrote, “I counted 38 instances in which the biographer convincingly disputes significant elements of Obama’s own story of his life and his family history.”

I counted many more than that, including the preposterous notion that Obama was a literary genius, a fraud that Maraniss and every other reporter even close to the mainstream left untouched.

As I learned from experience, to question any element of the Obama story was to risk being called a racist, in my case by the likes of Bill Maher and New Yorker editor David Remnick.

It is a good thing for Politico that Ben Carson is not black.