Obama of course is the Lance Armstrong of Presidents, particularly as to artificially supplemented and composited girlfriends.

Lamar Alexander is right up there with Colin Powell and Joe Scarborough.

This was a blatant attempt to ´launder´ Haley and his Roots fraud because it feeds the leftist narrative and therefore needs to be true.

Control,control,control.

Until I just read Nolte´s article, I had never heard a single word about Alex Haley´s "Roots" being a total fraud.
Apparently, it is extensively plagiarized from a fictional novel "The African" and yet claims to be a non-fictional account of Haley´s ancestors. Haley settled a plagiarism lawsuit by paying more than $500,000, and the book was largely ghost-written by a white writer from "Playboy." Even the geneaology records show this to be total fraud.
Yet, this total fraud--like Obama--is celebrated by the Leftists in academia and MSM.

The other thing of interest is the fight Haley´s heirs had over his estate and his "papers."

Lamar is a very big mistake that we Tennesseans made. He is the RINO´s RINO! A huge embarrassment to everyone in TN. He is a liar and a Demonrat brown noser. He makes me sick. I see him at the airport and he is so smug and arrogant. It is as though he thinks he is some kind of "Lord over the People" or something. I called his office when the START treaty was being negotiated and his staff flat out lied to me and I will never forget it. Came out in the local paper 2 weeks later, that he gave in to the START treaty to allow the union pensions to be funded as part of the treaty. He mysteriously never mentioned that before. I can´t stand the sleaze ball. Can you tell?

What? Roots is not true? Next you will tell us that Martin King plagiarized parts of his doctoral dissertation!

I´m shocked. How have I never heard this?

It is a compelling story. Too bad it´s a lie.

I wondered at the time about the odds that Haley would run into a person who had a narrative that coincided with his family considering the broken genealogies at that time.

I am a librarian. My mother is a librarian (probably the only two conservatives in the profession). We have known this for some time and are ashamed that our profession has helped perpetrate this fraud by shelving Roots in the biographies section.

And, there´s a statue of Haley in Annapolis.

I had never heard this before either. Like Nolte says: if the media wants it to be true, then it is true.

Is it any wonder so many of us are cynics?

I nearly gagged when Alexander quoted Hailey´s "Roots". Where has he been - in a cave somewhere?

This has been well-known for years in publishing, academic, and entertainment circles. It was a huge embarrassment to the board of the Pulitzer Prize. Few people want to admit that they´ve been so thoroughly duped.

Lamar is running for reelection in 2014, and will do everything to get votes from the Memphis area.

I can remember having come across an article about "Roots" and being crushed. I had never heard about the plagiarism suit in a public forum.

I also remember when DNA supposedly "proved" that Thomas Jefferson had fathered a bunch of kids with his deceased wife´s slave half-sister. That was on the front page of my paper. The retraction or clarification, in the form of a yelp from the test lab, was on page A-20. Evidently, he could not have fathered some of them because he was not even in the country at the time, and he had brothers or cousins who were around at any given time. This not only was meant to make a hero look bad, but it was trumpeted during the time of Clinton´s moral failings, so that it could be said of presidents that "they all do it."

The front page story will always be remembered as fact, which is what the press wants to happen.

And the US Coast Guard named a medium endurance cutter the CGC Alex Haley. (Haley served on active duty in the CG.)

Semper Peratus

And I went to school with Ben Vereen´s son.
A more entitled, arrogant, rude unlikeable person you´ve never met.
And it was all from his Dad´s $$ from this movie.
Ironic.

There is also a sequel to ´Roots´ called ´Queen´ which was never finished by Haley (his ghost writer completed it). I don´t think they even pretended to say that the sequel was based on fact, but it´s widely accepted as so w/o question.

Watched Roots a couple of weeks ago. So *that´s* where Kumbaya got viral. It was hard to take, had to stick my fingers in my ears and quietly scream to myself.

I´m surprised so many posters have said they didn´t know (were you being sarcastic?) I remember reading about that about the time of the plagiarism suit, but I thought it was a woman writer he had plagiarized.

#20, you were right. He also plagiarized Margaret Walker.