Oh, come on, Mr. President, stop editing WhiteHouse.gov to smear President Rutherford B. Hayes as a skeptic of the telephone.
(That’s actually a photoshop from Jeff Dobbs.)
But President Obama did repeat an apocryphal story about Hayes: “The quote cited by Obama does exist on the Internet, but we would expect the White House staff to do better research than that. (This line was in the president’s prepared text, so it was not ad-libbed.) But the trouble is, historians say that there is no evidence Hayes ever said this. Not only that, contrary to Obama’s jab, Hayes was interested in new technology.”
And as Seth Mandel first reported, someone in the White House is editing the official biographies of preceding presidents to include facts about Obama:
A stroll through the presidential biographies on the site (adapted from “The Presidents of the United States of America,” by Michael Beschloss and Hugh Sidey) shows Obama’s habit of rewriting history. Obama popped up in every single presidential biography since Coolidge, adding fun facts about his efforts to one-up our previous commanders-in-chief. Some examples:
* “On Feb. 22, 1924, Calvin Coolidge became the first president to make a public radio address to the American people. President Coolidge later helped create the Federal Radio Commission, which has now evolved to become the Federal Communications Commission. President Obama became the first president to hold virtual gatherings and town halls using Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc.”
I hope somebody plays Living Colour’s “Cult of Personality” at the 2012 Democratic Convention.