On Tuesday night, Lawrence O’Donnell devoted nearly four minutes of MSNBC show The Last Word to reading from and professing his complete admiration for President Barack Obama’s memoir Dreams From My Father as the “most honest,” “open,” “artful,” and “finest literary work ever authored by a President of the United States.”
Other than stating that “[t]he book doesn't contain the whole truth of Barack Obama's life” because “[b]ooks can't do that,” he spent no additional time on the book’s many lies and inconsistencies (which Obama even disclosed in the preface that he took liberties with his story).
This stands in stark contrast to O’Donnell spending 32 minutes and 22 seconds of his program on January 27 and 28 obsessing over the late Chris Kyle’s book (turned hit movie) American Sniper and bringing on multiple guests to discredit Kyle and his story.
During the January 27 show, O’Donnell had on Alyssa Rosenberg of The Washington Post and freelance journalist Courtney Duckworth (who wrote a piece that “fact-checked American Sniper’s accuracy for Slate”) to discuss Kyle’s story.
Rosenberg stated how she found it “interesting” that Kyle “was very comfortable” being “political conservative” and wished that the movie had spent more time on that part of who he was.
A former television writer and producer himself, O’Donnell disclosed that he does not “care ever about these precise historical accuracy of so-called historical films,” but had seconds earlier praised Duckworth for writing an article that proved “some of the essential glue of the screenplay is the stuff that isn’t true.”
Later, he asked Duckworth to rattle off more inconsistencies in effort to “not to in any way attack the movie, but just to let audiences know what they’re seeing” and know that “there’s a bunch of stuff in it that they should not think is true.”
The following night, O’Donnell spent a whopping 24 minutes and 5 seconds of his hour-long show on the subject. Needless to say, the result was more of the same. With two different guests appearing, he fretted that the movie represented “a very particular point of view” (and not the standard, anti-Bush views about the invasion of Iraq).
At one point, he wanted to make clear to his guests and viewers that, as far as the movie goes, he doesn’t “like to call him Chris Kyle because this is a fictional character.” The liberal MSNBC host also expressed amazement that Kyle continued serving in the Navy over in Iraq despite “information pour[ing] in that the war was waged under what turned out to be untrue pretenses.”
Zack Beauchamp from Vox.com also took his turn during O’Donnell’s January 28 show, blasting the movie for presenting “this entirely apolitical description of the Iraq war” that “miss[ed] the broader question, which is to say the political questions” of the war.
Later in show, Beauchamp criticized the film makers for failing to “dispel” how Chris Kyle viewed the world in terms of needing to stop Islamic terrorists over in the Middle East so they can’t escape and commit attacks on American soil.
While the focus of O’Donnell’s February 3 segment that brought up Obama’s book was in context of answers presidential candidates have given to whether they’ve used drugs, O’Donnell’s mini-tangent more than deserved a disclosure that much of Obama’s book wasn’t true when considering his utter fixation on poking holes in Kyle’s story.
