Every family tells stories. Every family embellishes those stories. My grandfather, a railroad man, was missing the first digit on one of his fingers. I was quite small (he died before I turned seven), but I asked him about it, and I remember a lavish tale of coupling railroad cars. In fact, he lost it on his farm, doing something not very bright; while feeding corn in to a silo, the machinery that strips the corn from the husk jammed, and without turning it off, he reached in to clear it. It started up, taking the end of one of his digits with it. Had my uncle not told me the real story about fifteen years ago, I might have gone to my deathbed thinking my grandfather had lost his finger in a hard-working, all-the-livelong-day moment on the Lehigh Valley Railroad.
On my mother's side, the story of one set of great-grandparents was that they were a former priest and nun from Germany, who fell in love and fled to Cincinnati. Later, the former nun went to confession, only to have the entire family ex-communicated for multiple generations (so much for my desire to convert). Finding safe landing in the Evangelical Church, one of their sons (Reiner, I forget his first name, but I found it in a list of bishops in a book on the history of that now defunct denomination) went on to become a bishop in that forerunner denomination to the United Methodist Church. Were they a priest and nun? Who knows. I know they came through Ellis Island, because my mother's youngest brother gave enough money to have a brick laid in the Johnston family name (I saw the certificate on the wall of his house at his funeral) at the memorial.
Barack Obama fudged a family story, that one could argue was qualitatively different. He said that his uncle was part of the army regiment the liberated Auschwitz. In fact, his uncle was a member of the 89th Infantry Division, which liberated Buchenwald concentration camp (a different entity entirely from the death factory in Poland, liberated by the Red Army months earlier). Not content to correct a factual inaccuracy that may or may not have been a simple misstatement, the right is going totus porcus in its declaration that Obama is continuing in the fine tradition of Hillary Clinton, making up stories to make himself look good. Bob Somerby gives Charles Krauthammer's huffing over-reaction and one can only wonder at the reaction compared to the alleged offense.
The cult of the offhand comment has become ridiculous in its almost daily expression.
