CosmicRocker

The Mendacity of Hope
What We Want to Believe About Obama

By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, January 1, 2008; Page A11

John Edwards lied about the cost of his haircuts. Fred Thompson lied about lobbying for a pro-choice outfit.
John McCain insists that the United States was founded as a "Christian nation." Mitt Romney concocted the story about how his father marched with Martin Luther King Jr.
And Rudy Giuliani is a one-man fib machine -- everything from why he had to provide police protection for his then-mistress to the survivability rates for prostate cancer in Britain.
Yet it is something Barack Obama said that bothers me most of all because Obama is a new kind of politician. He is supposed to be coolly authentic.

What concerns me is the lie or fib or misstatement -- call it what you want -- involved in Obama's assertion that more young black men are in prison than in college.
It is a shocking statistic -- and it is wrong. But when The Post's lonesome but formidable truth squad, Michael Dobbs, brought this to the attention of the Obama campaign, he not only got the brushoff but the assertion was later repeated.

You can appreciate the usefulness of this false claim.
It says something compelling about the plight of young, black males that is essentially true -- their condition amounts to a calamity and something has to be done.
But this particular comparison is wrong, and Obama must know it by now. Ought to be true is not the same as true.

After all, it ought to be true that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
It ought to be true that he had ties with Osama bin Laden.
It ought to be true that aluminum tubes were intended for a nuclear weapons program, and it ought to be true, really, that none of this mattered since what mattered most of all was a larger truth:
Hussein had to go and the Middle East had to be urban-renewed for the sake of democracy.

In a provocative recent essay for the New Republic's Web site, Princeton historian Sean Wilentz coined the phrase "the delusional style in American punditry."
He applied it to Obama's fans in the American press. His argument is that certain journalists are so enthralled by the sheer Obama-ness of Obama that they are willing to overlook everything they know about the fundamental value of experience.

In this regard, Wilentz cites a Boston Globe editorial that used Obama's memoir, "Dreams From My Father," to extol Obama's real-life experiences. Wilentz is not persuaded.
To him, the book is "not exactly a portrait of sterling honesty or authenticity."

I and others have written that Obama -- as he himself says in the introduction to this book -- invented composite characters and altered chronology.
But as the Chicago Tribune also reported, some of the events Obama passionately details seem not to have happened at all.
Maybe his memory played tricks on him. Mine sure does.

But I am not running for president. And if I were, I'd pay particular attention to the truth -- to the nagging facts that sometimes get in the way of a good story.
After all, it is not only Iraq that has been destroyed in the past several years -- so has whatever trust the American people still had in their government.
I have been at this game a long time, but for sheer manipulation of the facts, for a fudging of the truth, for the occasional bald lie, the Bush administration takes the cake. Cheney and truth cannot be found in the same sentence.

So the cavalier dismissal of Dobbs, The Post's truth-hunter, is troubling. Since he writes that the Obama campaign would not comment, it is reasonable to assume that it doesn't give a damn -- that this is a little matter and the candidate is engaged in something grand. The phony statistic is, in its way, like a composite. There's a larger truth here, get it?

No. When John McCain sticks to his insistence that the Constitution established the United States as a "Christian nation,"
I don't like it, but I know McCain and I know his character. He has a record in public life going back, essentially, to 1967, when he was shot down over Vietnam and repeatedly tortured by his captors.
Back in 2000, I might have gotten a bit "delusional" over him, but I had my reasons.

I am a bit enamored with Obama as well. But the man's public record is thin and the glow from him is distracting and my intuition tells me that sometimes intuition is no substitute for experience.
So, I'll sit back and watch some more -- and wait to see if Obama or anyone in his campaign calls back Dobbs and corrects the record.
"Facts are stubborn things," John Adams once said. So, to our regret, we keep learning the hard way.

__________________

Traveling Wilburys (l to r)

Bob Dylan, Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty, George Harrison, Roy Orbison

poetrychic

no wonder the truth squad only has one member:

MORE BLACK MEN IN PRISON THAN COLLEGE, STUDY SAYS

Some Cite Prison-Building Boom Since '80

The number of black men in jail or prison has grown fivefold in the past 20 years, to the point where more black men are behind bars than are enrolled in colleges or universities, according to a study released Tuesday.

The increase coincides with the prison construction boom that began 1980. Then, black men enrolled in institutions of higher learning outnumbered men behind bars by a 3-1 ratio, the study said.

The report was prepared by the Justice Policy Institute, which supports alternatives to incarceration.

The study found that in 2000 there were 791,600 black men in jail or prison, and 603,032 were enrolled in colleges or universities. By contrast, the study said that in 1980, 143,000 African-American men were in jail or prison while 463,700 were enrolled in colleges or universities.

Policy criticized

Some criminal-justice experts cautioned that it was somewhat misleading to compare the number of black men in jail and prison with the number in colleges and universities, because the number in jail and prison included all adult black men ranging upward from 17 years old, while the number in institutions of higher learning was confined to a smaller age range.

But Todd Clear, a professor of criminal justice at John Jay College in New York, said the study's findings were still significant, suggesting "a public policy far overemphasizing investment in criminal justice instead of in education for this population of black men."

Incarcerations rise

The study did not directly address why the number of black men in jail and prison climbed so quickly. Some experts suggested as one explanation a rise in the number of black men serving time for drug offenses. But Justice Department figures show that from 1990 to 2000, 50 percent of the growth in inmate populations at state prisons was for violent crimes, and that only 20 percent was for drug crimes.

During the prison building boom of the past two decades, the number of Americans of all races in jail or prison quadrupled, from 502,000 in 1980 to 2.1 million in 2000, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. In that same period, the number of Americans of all races attending colleges and universities rose from 12.1 million to 14.8 million, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v02/n1600/a03.html

CosmicRocker

^ 2002 study.
I wonder if there is anything more current?

thanks for taking the time to reseach and post this Chic

__________________

Traveling Wilburys (l to r)

Bob Dylan, Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty, George Harrison, Roy Orbison

poetrychic

welcome...i don't think there is anything more current, while i was doing my search i found that the study was based off of 2000 census population numbers and since there hasn't been another census yet, well, you know...

but i can see where mr. dobbs can skew it, because the number of black men in prison is a collective of all ages, however, what i find lacking is that in today's day and age there are a significant number of older students in college vs. the more traditional 18-25 year old demographic...that doesn't seem to be addressed...

this seems to be a very decent representation of how our "media" has gotten off on a tail chasing expedition, where facts appear irrelevant to the sensation of damaging another

lucytalk

op-ed piece or not, you'd think the washington post would not have let this piece of bullshit run.

now fox news could have had it as a breaking news story but wapo ?

mudwhistle

Barry Hussein said young black men. There are more 18-25 year old black men in college than in prison. Hussein's a liar. But he's also a Democrat so that goes without saying.

Titanium Cat

While it looks like Obama is incorrect about his claim, the figures are certainly in the same ballpark. However for this author to even mention such discrepencies in any sort of comparative way with lies such as "there is no doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction" is an example of pathetically horrid journalism.

mudwhistle

There is no comparison. Iraq did have WMDs and we found them. That was absolutely true, unlike what Barry Hussein is claiming.

Titanium Cat

Bullshit. Absolute bullshit. You can repeat that nonsense over and over again but it doesn't make it true.

poetrychic

yeah, when clinton was president which is why half the country and a few senators who were paying attention knew bush's claims were complete bullshit, thanks for pointing that out...oh, and mud, bottom line is that there are still more black men in prison than school, age notwithstanding