First Lady Michelle Obama on Monday denied accusations that she had not gotten along with her husband’s former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

New York Times correspondent Jodi Kantor’s new book “The Obamas” charges that the first lady believed the president’s advisers were “insular, disorganized” and “not careful planners.”

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“Rahm is — and Amy, his wife, are some of our dearest friends,” Mrs. Obama told CBS host Gayle King. “Rahm and I have never had a cross word. He’s a funny guy.”

“You know, I guess it’s more interesting to imagine this conflicted situation here, and a strong woman,” she explained. “But that’s been an image that people have tried to paint of me since the day Barack announced, that I’m some angry black woman.”

The first lady added: “That’s why I don’t read these books. Because it’s a game in so many ways that doesn’t really get — I mean, who can write about how I feel? What third person can tell me how I feel?”

Since before then-Sen. Obama became the Democratic nominee in 2008, critics have attempted to label Michelle Obama as a “militant” and a “radical.”

In August of 2008, Fox News contributor Juan Williams gave voice to the impression that many on the right had been trying to create.

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“I do not think she can go for it all out in terms of this kind of militant anger that she sometimes uses,” Williams told Fox News host Megyn Kelly. “She can be, it seems, rather cynical or dismissive of people.”

Watch this video from CBS’s CBS This Morning, broadcast Jan. 11, 2011.

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(H/T: The New York Daily News)