People Are Freaking Out Over Obama Supposedly Admitting He Made Up His Ex-Girlfriend

For the sake of compression, let's look at this passage from Barack Obama's "Dreams from My Father":

“For the sake of compression, some of the characters that appear are composites of people, I’ve known, and some events appear out of precise chronology. With the exception of my family and a handful of public figures, the names of most characters have been changed for the sake of privacy.”

Go find it. It's on Page XVII, everyone.

Now, this is a story today because Vanity Fair published an excerpt of David Maraniss' forthcoming biography of Obama, entitled "Barack Obama: The Story."

In it, Maraniss explains how one of Obama's recollections in his memoir — about visiting an ex-girlfriend's family in Norfolk, Conn. and some conclusions he drew from it about the differences in their background — led to a differing account and remembrance from an ex-girlfriend, Genevieve Cook. He interviewed Obama about this, and Obama said it was an example of one of the "compressions" he specified in his memoir.

That wasn't reflected in this Politico story, which reported that "Obama makes no mention of this compression." And that Politico story led to this:

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