From left: OMB Director Peter Orszag, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, Nancy-Ann DeParle, director of the White House Office for Health Reform, and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano
Labor Secretary Hilda Solis
Samantha Power, left, Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs, and Susan E. Rice, U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations
Melody Barnes, Domestic Policy Council Director
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa P. Jackson
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor
Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan
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Jacob Weisberg (Slate): His book about Obama is as spurious as the ones he wrote about Bush……
As an editor, you develop a B.S. meter …. There’s no journalist who sets off my bullshit alarm like Ron Suskind …. Issues of accuracy, fairness, and integrity come up nearly every time Suskind publishes something. Key sources claim they’ve been misrepresented and misquoted, that basic facts are wrong, and that the Pulitzer-winning reporter has misconstrued the larger story as well…..
If you wrote about the Bush Administration, as I did, you soon learned to avoid relying on Suskind’s reporting absent strong independent corroboration. What his three books had in common was the way they grabbed onto some interesting nugget and hyped it into something that, while bait for the news cycle and the bestseller lists, was fundamentally untrue…..
….Suskind has now turned his egregious writing and dubious technique on the Obama administration in his new book, Confidence Men. Once again, his work is strewn with small but telling errors. Here are a few: see link
… his bigger points are equally inaccurate …. He uses two key quotes to support his claim of sexism ….. In Dunn’s case, Suskind spliced her actual words in a way that distorts their meaning, leaving out the crucial phrase “if it weren’t for the president”….
…. The most interesting claim in Suskind’s book is that Geithner blocked the breakup of Citigroup against the wishes of President Obama, exemplifying the supposed problem that “the young president’s authority was being systematically undermined or hedged by his seasoned advisers.” The problem with this tale is that it, too, is plainly wrong.
…. In the book, Suskind claims that the president confirmed his version of the Citi episode in an interview. He has been repeating this claim on his publicity tour. But a transcript of that part of their conversation that the White House Press Office released to me shows nothing of the kind….
Suskind loves disputes like this, as do his publishers, because they sell more books. If the victims of his terrible reporting respond publicly, he wins. But at this point, Suskind should no longer be treated as a “controversial” journalist as much as a disreputable one. His fellow journalists no longer trust him. Readers shouldn’t either.
Full article here
The Obama Diary 