Watch Obama's press secretary Jay Carney change the question into the one he's willing to answer.

Can we get the answer to the question asked?

Obama lied about a central fact about his own life which he used — powerfully — to push health care reform.

"Book Challenges Obama on Mother’s Deathbed Fight," says the NYT, which, of course, isn't generally inclined to cast unnecessary aspersions on this President. "Lied" is my paraphrasing. The NYT wrote "mischaracterized."

During his presidential campaign and subsequent battle over a health care law, Mr. Obama quieted crowds with the story of his mother’s fight with her insurer over whether her cancer was a pre-existing condition that disqualified her from coverage.

In offering the story as an argument for ending pre-existing condition exclusions by health insurers, the president left the clear impression that his mother’s fight was over health benefits for medical expenses.

But in “A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother,” author Janny Scott quotes from correspondence from the president’s mother to assert that the 1995 dispute concerned a Cigna disability insurance policy and that her actual health insurer had apparently reimbursed most of her medical expenses without argument....

The book came out in early May. The reason this article is hitting the front page today is that the NYT has been trying to extract a response from Obama.

On Wednesday, in response to repeated requests for comment that The Times first made in mid-June, shortly after the book’s release....

It took repeated requests for the NYT to get an answer to such an important question?!

... a White House spokesman chose not to dispute either Ms. Scott’s account or Mr. Obama’s memory, while arguing that Mr. Obama’s broader point remained salient.

Fake false but accurate?!

“We have not reviewed the letters or other material on which the author bases her account,” said Nicholas Papas, the spokesman. “The president has told this story based on his recollection of events that took place more than 15 years ago.”

This is the standard response of the memoirist: These are my memories. This is how I remember it. Even if I am mistaken, there is truth in the way this story has become part of me. (That notion is expressed beautifully in the interview at the end of the audiobook version of the thoroughly delightful "The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir.")

But I don't accept that the President could have an innocently false memory about this story, which he milked dramatically, as Byron York describes here:

"I remember in the last month of her life, she wasn't thinking about how to get well, she wasn't thinking about coming to terms with her own mortality, she was thinking about whether or not insurance was going to cover the medical bills and whether our family would be bankrupt as a consequence," Obama said in September 2007.

"She was in her hospital room looking at insurance forms because the insurance company said that maybe she had a pre-existing condition and maybe they wouldn't have to reimburse her for her medical bills," Obama added in January 2008.

"The insurance companies were saying, 'Maybe there's a pre-existing condition and we don't have to pay your medical bills,' " Obama said in a debate with Republican opponent Sen. John McCain in October 2008.

Those terrible, heartless corporations have been a theme of the Obama presidency. He has been trying to structure American brains around that idea, so he can win acceptance of policies that most Americans don't want, and that story of his personal agony played an important role in pushing through an immense federal power.

A Drudge photo juxtaposition, presented for your intepretation.

You've got Obama, turning to his right, gleefully chomping a chocolate-dipped strawberry, with the heading "Obama Ready to Eat the Press." (The linked article is about the White House Correspondents' Dinner tonight.) The photo underneath Obama is his father, turning in the opposite direction, a pipe clenched in his teeth. (The heading beneath that pic is "Obama's father forced out at Harvard...," linking to an article referring to Harvard's "difficulty... figur[ing] out how many wives he had.") The third picture freezes Mitch Daniels in a gesture that gives the impression — to my eye — of being quite rude.



Come on, Matt. What's this supposed to mean? A wider view may flesh out the meaning:

"'She was a very strong person in her own way,' Obama said, when I asked about Ann’s limitations as a mother."

Writes Janny Scott at the end of a long NYT Magazine article about Stanley Ann Dunham:

“Resilient, able to bounce back from setbacks, persistent — the fact that she ended up finishing her dissertation. But despite all those strengths, she was not a well-organized person. And that disorganization, you know, spilled over. Had it not been for my grandparents, I think, providing some sort of safety net financially, being able to take me and my sister on at certain spots, I think my mother would have had to make some different decisions. And I think that sometimes she took for granted that, ‘Well, it’ll all work out, and it’ll be fine.’ But the fact is, it might not always have been fine, had it not been for my grandmother. . . . Had she not been there to provide that floor, I think our young lives could have been much more chaotic than they were.”

Did you have a flash — reading that — that he's like his mother, and we, the taxpayers, are like the grandparents? We'll come through. We'll provide the floor through which the country cannot crash.

But he did not, he said, hold his mother’s choices against her. Part of being an adult is seeing your parents “as people who have their own strengths, weaknesses, quirks, longings.” He did not believe, he said, that parents served their children well by being unhappy. If his mother had cramped her spirit, it would not have given him a happier childhood. As it was, she gave him the single most important gift a parent can give — “a sense of un conditional love that was big enough that, with all the surface disturbances of our lives, it sustained me, entirely.”

Please, America. Don't cramp my style. I'm a unique spirit, here to give that special gift that I have brought into the world. It's all for the best, if you'll be that floor.

An inconvenient knee.

You know the pic does look pretty fake. But that knee!

As 3 women push him into war, President Obama goes to Brazil, with 5 women, to see Brazil's female President, who gives him the cold shoulder.

"One of the main reasons for my trip is to strengthen economic partnerships abroad so that we create good jobs at home," Obama said, using what could be a stock justification for any presidential trip. I'm not buying it. In times of crisis, the President belongs in the White House.

The NYT channels the insipid campaign 2012 PR:

Mr. Obama’s visit has also been billed as way for him to connect more generally with Latin Americans, especially in Brazil, a multiracial society where he has been wildly popular since his presidential campaign. But the White House’s plans to stage a speech in a plaza where thousands of Brazilians could see him were aborted in favor of one indoors, at the Teatro Municipal in Rio de Janeiro on Sunday, because of the Secret Service’s security concerns.

Oh, the theater — the teatro —  didn't even work out. Obama in Brazil was supposed to look like Obama in Berlin. The photo-op... botched. My advice: You're President. The security in the White House is ideal. The imagery is ideal. Be President.

Ugh. I can't believe I'm reading this on the same day I'm reading about 3 women prodding him into action in Libya. Accompanying him on his trip to South America are: his wife, Michelle Obama; his daughters, Sasha and Malia; his mother-in-law, Marian Robinson; and his daughters’ godmother, Eleanor Kaye Wilson. 5 women.

And why is he going to Brazil?

The Brazilians under the new presidency of Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s first female president, are eager to build closer economic and political ties to the Obama administration. 

Females, females, females!

But their occasional differences on the international stage were reflected on Thursday night when Brazil was one of five nations to abstain in the vote of the United Nations Security Council to authorize force against Libya.

There's imagery for you: The male, emasculated by female abstention.

After a bilateral get-acquainted meeting with Ms. Rousseff, Mr. Obama was to [blah blah]...

“She has been very positive about the type of relationship that she wants to pursue with the United States,” said Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser, in a briefing before the trip.

But the Obama-Rousseff relationship-building got off to an inauspicious start when, before Mr. Obama boarded Air Force One, came word that Ms. Rousseff was refusing to hold the scheduled joint press conference with Mr. Obama here on Saturday after their first meeting. 

Looks like that first date bilateral get-acquainted meeting didn't go too well. One world leader is playing this relationship for powerful imagery, and it's not Obama. He must feel so used. He went all the way to South America, and all he got was a lousy indoor stage show. No massive, multiracial crowd scene, no presser with Dilma.

I'm picturing Obama banging on a closed door yelling "Dilma!" — like this.

Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo. "This is what America's 44th president would look like if he shaved his head, wore a bandanna, favored black T-shirts and sported an earring in his left ear."

The President's half-brother. He's written a book about his life:

[H]e depicts their Kenyan father as an abusive alcoholic who beats David and David's Jewish American mother.

George Obama, arrested.

Marijuana.