Since When Have Stoners Been Able to Shut Their Pieholes About With Whom They've Toked?

This bit, allegedly from a lawyer for Cindy McCain pushing back against NYT stupidity, where the correspondent questions why the wife of a candidate is getting so much more scrutiny and delving into her past when compared to the actual candidate of the other side, reminded me of something that's bothered me about Dreams of My Father.

I haven't read it, but as has been pointed out over and over again, Obama readily admits to having a misspent youth and having run around with druggy friends and got himself involved into that scene as a high school kid in Hawaii and as an undergrad in Los Angeles at Occidental.

I think he's lying. I think he never was that much into that stuff, but he needed to have something that he 'overcame', so he exaggerated his use of drugs so that his story arc could be that of redemption and struggle rather than privilege and ease.

Simply put, druggies love telling stories about who they get high with, and if they got high with someone famous, or would later become famous, despite their blissed out nature and poor short term memory, this is the kind of detail they'd love to endlessly talk about.

The sad truth about Sen. Obama is that he was a square then, he was a square at Harvard, and he's a square now, but he's afraid the notion that he's always been square would be bad for his image, so he constructed this narrative about his past that was based on attending a few parties and he spun this into his own 'struggle' with the demon weed and the Colombian marching powder.

Sorry, but I ain't buying it. If you were a real user, then you've got the scars, stories, and associations real users collect, and there's just no evidence of this.

If you don't believe me, here's what was reported in the NYT back in February:

Mr. Obama’s account of his younger self and drugs, though, significantly differs from the recollections of others who do not recall his drug use. That could suggest he was so private about his usage that few people were aware of it, that the memories of those who knew him decades ago are fuzzy or rosier out of a desire to protect him, or that he added some writerly touches in his memoir to make the challenges he overcame seem more dramatic.

In more than three dozen interviews, friends, classmates and mentors from his high school and Occidental recalled Mr. Obama as being grounded, motivated and poised, someone who did not appear to be grappling with any drug problems and seemed to dabble only with marijuana.

I have a much bigger problem with someone making up youthful indiscretions, rather than actually having youthful indiscretions. For the former, you are a grown-assed person who should know better than to fabricate an identity for yourself, for the latter, you were young dumb and full of vigor, so as long as you didn't get anyone killed or jailed for more than a decade, no harm done (except to yourself).

It's amazing how often, and in how many different contexts, that the memories and accounts of everyone around Sen. Obama seems to fail them. There always seems to be a discrepancy between his recollection and those of the rest of the universe. Obviously, the universe is wrong, cause The One does not make those kind of mistakes.