The Politico Goes All in on "Opinions on Shape of Earth Differ" Journalism...

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Greg Sargent, at least, is unhappy with this:

The Plum Line - No, it's not okay to traffic in pure fiction about Obama's heritage: Ben Smith writes that my criticism of Mike Huckabee is unfair:

Is the idea that Obama's intellectual history should be tied to his personal narrative and to a father whom he barely knew really all that crazy or racist? I recall some guy writing a book along those lines once. Obama has also spoken himself about the impact growing up in the developing world has had on his views. More broadly, the line that Serwer's dismissing here is the fringe of an argument that's worth taking seriously: Obama's roots in politics, to the degree he thought about foreign policy at all, are on the left, in the campus anti-nuclear movement and in an academic Chicago milieu in which Palestinian activists recalled him as sympathetic. He moved right on all sorts of things as he approached the national stage, but as he puts a very personal stamp on American foreign policy at a turbulent moment, it's legitimate to look at his personal education.

Right, but Huckabee didn't "look at his personal education." Huckabee created an entirely fictional one. It's one thing to tie Obama's politics to his personal narrative, as Smith suggests, but it's another thing entirely to reduce them to caricature through elaborate invention.

The point of Huckabee's "Obama grew up in Kenya sympathizing with the Mau-Mau's" remark is to tell a story about Obama's life that never actually happened.... [I]t doesn't seem like it's asking too much to insist that people use his actual personal background to do so.... Huckabee is pretending that he was raised by his father and grandfather in Kenya, and has a visceral hatred of Winston Churchill, when in reality he was raised largely by his white grandparents in Hawaii. Huckabee is proposing (tentatively) that the only reason to believe the president is not lying about his birth certificate is because the evil Clintons would have exposed him otherwise. He's suggesting that the liberal politics he embraced are, therefore, as David Frum wrote, of the "Kenyan anti-colonialism" thesis, "motivated by anti-white racial revenge."

But Obama's actual life wouldn't confirm any of this.

So conservatives have invented an alternate universe in which Obama's absent father raised him in Kenya to hate the British and that his entire administration is therefore an elaborate scheme for racial payback. The fiction is so pervasive that Huckabee appeared to think it was actually true. He had heard it so many times that he found himself repeating it with no self-consciousness whatsoever.

The question is not whether Obama's "personal background" plays a role in his politics. Everyone's personal background does. But if I said that Huckabee hates Obama because white conservatives from Arkansas hate black people because the National Guard was once called in to forcibly integrate schools in his home state, that would be outrageous, unfair, and false. That isn't much different from saying that Obama's policies are the result of him "growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather." It's the misinformation, in service of a grand fictional narrative, that's the problem.