I’m all for holding politicians accountable for their misstatements, but it looks like Barack Obama is going to get the Al Gore treatment of trivial nitpicking, as Bob Somerby notes — check out this Politico article:

But in Obama’s case, the presidential campaign hazing is complicated by 442 pages of words from his own pen. “Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance” was written in 1995, when Obama was giving little thought to the political implications of his life story. The words sat barely noticed for almost a decade, then blossomed into a best-seller after Obama’s masterly 2004 speech to the Democratic National Convention.

Now they are being read by journalists with intense scrutiny. On Sunday, the Chicago Tribune reported that an extensive search found no basis for an episode Obama recounts about a picture he ran across in Life magazine of a “black man who had tried to peel off his skin” in a failed effort to use chemicals to lighten it. Obama writes that “seeing that article was violent for me, an ambush attack.” The Tribune reported: “Yet no such Life issue exists, according to historians at the magazine. No such photos, no such article. When asked about the discrepancy, Obama said in a recent interview, ‘It might have been an Ebony or it might have been … who knows what it was?’ (At the request of the Tribune, archivists at Ebony searched their catalogue of past articles, none of which matched what Obama recalled.)”

…As another example, consider Obama’s stirring tale for the Selma audience about how he had been conceived by his parents, Barack Obama Sr. and Ann Dunham, because they had been inspired by the fervor following the “Bloody Sunday” voting rights demonstration that was commemorated March 4. “There was something stirring across the country because of what happened in Selma, Ala.,” he said, “because some folks are willing to march across a bridge. So they got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born. So don’t tell me I don’t have a claim on Selma, Ala. Don’t tell me I’m not coming home to Selma, Ala.”

Obama was born in 1961, and the Selma march occurred four years later, in 1965. The New York Times reported that when the senator was asked about the discrepancy later that day, he clarified: “I meant the whole civil rights movement.”