A Way to Ease the President's Guilt about Book Millions
On July 11 President Barack Obama argued that he most certainly should pay more taxes for the book royalty income that he does not need (and did not deserve).
This wonderfully absurd bit of movie-making suggests a legal way to separate President Barack Obama from the millions he feels guilty about earning -- namely a class action law suit for fraud. I do not know the movie-makers, but I love their sense of the possible.
In the way of precedent, readers who felt tricked by James Frey's claim that his memoir, A Million Little Pieces, was fully factual took their case to Random House, and the publisher set aside $2.35 million for lawsuits.
Random House may have to pony up some more. Even the Obama-friendly biographer David Remnick concedes that Obama's acclaimed "memoir," Dreams from My Father, is not to be taken at face value. He calls it a "mixture of verifiable fact, recollection, recreation, invention, and artful shaping."
And say what you will about Frey, but at least he wrote his own material.