Attack Me, But At Least Spell My Name Right

The Palace Guards over at MediaMatters are taking nasty swipes at me this morning — “Right-Wing Media’s Latest Embarrassment: Obama Lied About Birthplace to Get Ahead.” I suppose that’s to be expected when Rush Limbaugh quotes your article (“The Mystery of the Kenyan Birth“) on his show.

What’s amusing is that the MM crew takes at face value the assertion by Obama’s agents that the “born in Kenya” statement at the top of Barack’s biography was just a 1991 mistake that for some reason went unnoticed until 2007, although numerous other entries in the same pamphlet had been updated. (The literary agency, Acton & Dystel, has explained that the “born in Kenya” line “was nothing more than a fact checking error.”)

Hello?  Are you kidding?  In my informal poll of several authors of numerous books in the last day or two, not a single one of them had ever heard of such a thing or could have imagined it.  It certainly wasn’t remotely my experience, as the author of eleven books.  We all remembered our first books and what close (almost obsessive) attention we paid to the publicity, whether from agents or publishers. The idea that we  — or Obama of all people — would have missed our country of birth in the opening paragraph of some bio is risible.

Never mind.  MM will believe what it wants to believe.  But speaking of fact checking, I wouldn’t mind if they referred to us as PJ Media, not Pajamas Media as they did at the link. The name has been changed for several months. If they do, I promise to refer to them as MediaMatters, not MishMash.