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Bill Ayers: “I wrote Dreams From My Father”
http://www.cdobs.com/archive/from-blogs/bill-ayers-i-wrote-dreams-from-my-father,73125
Anne Leary 6 October 2009 6 Comments
There I was, sitting in Reagan National Monday morning, sipping a Starbucks by the United counter before going through security. I had a little time, so I was browsing through the news. Some military guys had borrowed a chair from my table. I looked up from time to time to enjoy the sun streaming through. That’s when I saw Bill Ayers, an instant blight. Scruffy, thinning beard, dippy earring, and the wirerims, heading to order. I gathered my things, got my camera ready, and snapped a shot right when he got his coffee.
I asked–what are you doing in D.C. Mr. Ayers?
For a moment I thought he might be on my flight back to Chicago. Charming. Initially I guess he thought I was laying claim to his coffee or something. He gave me an uneasy cheesy smile when he realized I was taking his picture. I asked him if he was speaking at GW? (Only I said GFW, guess I had the VFW on my mind) He said oh you mean GW, he said no…was trying to decide if I was a fan, then said he was giving a lecture in Arlington to a Renaissance group on education–that’s what I do, education–you shouldn’t believe everything you hear about me, you know nothing about me. I said, I know plenty–I’m from Chicago, a conservative blogger, and I’ll post this. (Oh, yeah, Bill Ayers, quite the Renaissance man, nail-bomber extraordinaire. Gee, I see another friend of Barack, U.S. Sec. of Education Arne Duncan was there too. “The conference theme is “A Time for Reflection, Celebration and Rebirth.” How touching. At best, useless, at worst, so wrong.)
Then, unprompted he said–I wrote Dreams From My Father. I said, oh, so you admit it. He said–Michelle asked me to. I looked at him. He seemed eager. He’s about my height, short. He went on to say–and if you can prove it, we can split the royalties. So I said, stop pulling my leg. Horrible thought. But he came again–I really wrote it, the wording was similar. I said I believe you probably heavily edited it. He said–I wrote it. I said–why would I believe you, you’re a liar.
He had no answer to that. Just looked at me. Then he turned and walked off, and said again his bit about my proving it and splitting the proceeds.
But the question remains–is Barack Obama a fraud? Is his myth-making creation and only major accomplishment a product of Bill Ayers’ imagination? (or his own) Is our President Barack Obama’s biography written by an unrepentant domestic terrorist?
Perhaps I’ll become Bill Ayers’ favorite conservative blogger and he can prove his authorship himself–turn over your notes Bill. And how about turning yourself in for your crimes.
I remember that era, Mr. Ayers. People died because of your actions, including your girlfriend. More would have if you had been more successful. And yet you have the gall to teach the teachers of our young. I won’t forget your murderous intent, your shameful acts, your contemptible lies and evasions. And when history is written, I hope you’ll be reviled–or forgotten.
As for our President, the verdict is still out. But Barack Obama called Bill Ayers friend and colleague for years. That in itself makes a damning statement.
Read more from Anne Leary at Backyard Conservative
________________________ ________________________ __________
The plot thickens.
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so another tabloid writer has a mysterious conversation that he can't prove. Ayers BEGGED the author to help him prove obama is a liar about this - but the reporter's Qs scared Ayers away? Come on...
I'm sure if this were the case, mr Ayers himself would be getting a lawyer and demanding his royalties for writing it. not whispering to some conservative blogger then disappearing into the night.
33, your sources like "Backyard Conservative" just get weaker and weaker. You want this to be true so bad that you'll believe anything from any source.
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so another tabloid writer has a mysterious conversation that he can't prove. Ayers BEGGED the author to help him prove obama is a liar about this - but the reporter's Qs scared Ayers away? Come on...
I'm sure if this were the case, mr Ayers himself would be getting a lawyer and demanding his royalties for writing it. not whispering to some conservative blogger then disappearing into the night.
33, your sources like "Backyard Conservative" just get weaker and weaker. You want this to be true so bad that you'll believe anything from any source.
I didnt say it was proof, I just said the plot thickens.
BTW - has Obama ever denied any of these claims or those of Andersen in his new book?
No!
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so another tabloid writer has a mysterious conversation that he can't prove. Ayers BEGGED the author to help him prove obama is a liar about this - but the reporter's Qs scared Ayers away? Come on...
I'm sure if this were the case, mr Ayers himself would be getting a lawyer and demanding his royalties for writing it. not whispering to some conservative blogger then disappearing into the night.
33, your sources like "Backyard Conservative" just get weaker and weaker. You want this to be true so bad that you'll believe anything from any source.
BTW - ANDERSEN IS NOT A WEAK SOURCE 240.
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so another tabloid writer has a mysterious conversation that he can't prove. Ayers BEGGED the author to help him prove obama is a liar about this - but the reporter's Qs scared Ayers away? Come on...
I'm sure if this were the case, mr Ayers himself would be getting a lawyer and demanding his royalties for writing it. not whispering to some conservative blogger then disappearing into the night.
33, your sources like "Backyard Conservative" just get weaker and weaker. You want this to be true so bad that you'll believe anything from any source.
LOL this coming from the guy who spouted rumors from the dailykos and the national enquirer as truth HHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAH pot meet kettle his name is 240
LOL then you come on here and say if its not true she could just sue ahHAHAHAHHAHHAHAHJHAHAHA LOL again showing your ignorance
give it a rest 240 i know obongo pays you by the post but shit your going to get carpal tunel if you keep butt plugging for him on here.
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333 you're searching here. Poor source, weak article with no credible evidence other than heresay.
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333 you're searching here. Poor source, weak article with no credible evidence other than heresay.
I said the plot thickens. I do thing Andersen probably had very good sources on this.
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and i've been the first to admit i ran with stories from shitty sources back then.
the logic in this article doesnt make sense. Ayers appraoched this blogger to help him get $ from the book he actually wrote. Then, when questioned, he ran. Then he pled his case again as he left.
This would hurt obama in a big way - and the conservative blogger didn't help Ayers? Rather, she just wrote her blog without him?
Smells funny dude. Any reporter woth hill of beans would have a recorded statement immediately, get a lawyer, and come out with the story and lawsuit of the decade. Ayers just approached her?
Eh, 33, do you really buy this story? When you say "I didnt say it was proof, I just said the plot thickens." What does that mean?
Plot thickens when you add more fiction to the mix?
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I said the plot thickens. I do thing Andersen probably had very good sources on this.
Speculation sources are not 'very good'. Outside of a confession from either Obama or Ayers you're really reaching.
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I believe Andersens' account especialliy considering the fact that it has been out there for a few weeks and Obama has not disputed it.
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I said the plot thickens.
If by "the plot" you mean "silly delusions", then I agree.
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Obama has not disputed it.
I don't recall Bush disputing the claim that he was Hilter either. So what is your point? Do you have one?
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I believe Andersens' account especialliy considering the fact that it has been out there for a few weeks and Obama has not disputed it.
obama also hasn't disputed 10,000,000 other things that have been said about him on the blogs.
So until Gibbs stands in front of the white house press corps and denies the birthers and that obama is a marxist, commie, nazi, and everything else he's be called...
it's safe to assume it's true? Come on dude.
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I believe Andersens' account especialliy considering the fact that it has been out there for a few weeks and Obama has not disputed it.
Why would he? Baseless accusations are just that baseless. It would lend some sort of false credibility to the writers for him to acknowledge such a thing.
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obama also hasn't disputed 10,000,000 other things that have been said about him on the blogs.
So until Gibbs stands in front of the white house press corps and denies the birthers and that obama is a marxist, commie, nazi, and everything else he's be called...
it's safe to assume it's true? Come on dude.
He also has not disputed Cashills' reporting on the matter either.
Face it - Obama = Ayers, Rezko, Rev. Wright, Khladidi, etc.
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Why would he? Baseless accusations are just that baseless. It would lend some sort of false credibility to the writers for him to acknowledge such a thing.
Just as baseless as his not knowing about Rev. Wright. ::) ::) ::)
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Just as baseless as his not knowing about Rev. Wright. ::) ::) ::)
Just where exactly did he say he didn't know Rev Wright?
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Just where exactly did he say he didn't know Rev Wright?
He said he never heard the hateful sermons that were exposed on the video tape.
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September 24, 2009
Andersen Book Blows Ayers' Cover on 'Dreams' (updated)
Jack Cashill
In his new book, "Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage," Best-selling celebrity journalist, Christopher Andersen, has blown a huge hole in the Obama genius myth without intending to do so.
Relying on inside sources, quite possibly Michelle Obama herself, Andersen describes how Dreams came to be published -- just as I had envisioned it in my articles on the authorship of Dreams. With the deadline pressing, Michelle recommended that Barack seek advice from "his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers."
To flesh out his family history, Obama had taped interviews with various family members. Andersen writes, "These oral histories, along with a partial manuscript and a truckload of notes, were given to Ayers." Andersen quotes a Hyde Park neighbor, "Everyone knew they were friends and that they worked on various projects together. It was no secret. Why would it be? People liked them both."
Andersen continues, "In the end, Ayers's contribution to Barack's Dreams From My Father would be significant--so much so that the book's language, oddly specific references, literary devices, and themes would bear a jarring similarity to Ayers's own writing."
More to come!
Update: Ron Radosh takes up the case.
Finally, Christopher Andersen concludes: "In the end, Ayers's contribution to Barack's Dreams From My Father would be significant - so much so that the book's language, oddly specific references, literary devices, and themes would bear a jarring similarity to Ayers's own writing."
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33, youre a lawyer? you passed the bar? and your standard of proof is "well, he didn't deny it!"
???
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He said he never heard the hateful sermons that were exposed on the video tape.
Perhaps he didn't. Do you have photograhic or video evidence to the contrary? If so please share. If not, it's unproven.
Your sources are nonsense.
It's like me posting some obscure blog where someone says 'glen beck, GW and Rush are all involved in a love triangle they invited Sadaam but he rebuffed them, hence the Iraq war.' It's true i was drinking starbucks when they told me!
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It's like me posting some obscure blog where someone says 'glen beck, GW and Rush are all involved in a love triangle they invited Sadaam but he rebuffed them, hence the Iraq war.' It's true i was drinking starbucks when they told me!
Hey, did those fellahs ever DENY this affair? Cause if not, 333386 might make some inferences of guilt...
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33, youre a lawyer? you passed the bar? and your standard of proof is "well, he didn't deny it!"
???
I'm saying that there are many questions surrounding this entire myth that is Obama. since he has refused to authorize a release of any paperwork or records at any level whatsoever, these questions remain.
Whether it is the BC issue, his school records, his state senate records, college records, medical records, or anything for that matter, he has provided fodder for many to dig into his past.
He was very close with Ayeres and should have just admitted it in the first place.
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33, youre a lawyer? you passed the bar? and your standard of proof is "well, he didn't deny it!"
???
I believe it is. Although possible sources like the First Lady telling everyone their secrets sounds better.
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I believe it is. Although possible sources like the First Lady telling everyone their secrets sounds better.
But 240's sources on Palins' child are better?
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But 240's sources on Palins' child are better?
Never said they were and never said i agreed with them. You're clutching at straws here 333.
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obama also hasn't disputed 10,000,000 other things that have been said about him on the blogs.
So until Gibbs stands in front of the white house press corps and denies the birthers and that obama is a marxist, commie, nazi, and everything else he's be called...
it's safe to assume it's true? Come on dude.
Palin never disputed the jerkoffs who spread the lies about the baby and you say that PROVES its true.Incredible.
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But 240's sources on Palins' child are better?
I admitted it was weak on my part, and I don't half-ass sources anymore.
you're still doing it.
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I admitted it was weak on my part, and I don't half-ass sources anymore.
you're still doing it.
Oh relax - cant we all indulge in CT's sometimes 240?
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Based on this logic, I wouldn't use 333 for any attorney needs I might have.
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Based on this logic, I wouldn't use 333 for any attorney needs I might have.
When you get arrested again for indecent exposure to young school boys, dont call me!
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Don't worry. I won't.
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Don't worry. I won't.
Yeah, a repeat offender like yourself probably stands no chance. ;D ;D
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Palin never disputed the jerkoffs who spread the lies about the baby and you say that PROVES its true.Incredible.
um, did you even read this thread? i've mocked such poor logic.
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obama also hasn't disputed 10,000,000 other things that have been said about him on the blogs.
So until Gibbs stands in front of the white house press corps and denies the birthers and that obama is a marxist, commie, nazi, and everything else he's be called...
it's safe to assume it's true? Come on dude.
\what a brutal double standard you have you tool, not but a week ago you were saying that b/c palin hasnt sued the nat enq their story must have some traction without even knowing shit about suing for libel as a public figure but now youre ok with obama not addressing shit? ::)
240 the official obama butt plug...
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sorry 240 you cant play dumb in one instance and then "act" smart in another when it suits your idiot ass.
You touted the nat enq and dailykos rumors as truth and you know you did but this is some how speculative in your eyes?
You also said b/c palin hasnt sued there must be some traction to the nat enq story but when obama doesnt address a rumor its ok?
your messiah is leading you to be very inconsistent 240
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Yeah, a repeat offender like yourself probably stands no chance. ;D ;D
I got a bag of candy, a white van and a lost puppy.
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I got a bag of candy, a white van and a lost puppy.
Ha ha. put your clown mask away cowboy. ;D
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Perhaps he didn't. Do you have photograhic or video evidence to the contrary? If so please share. If not, it's unproven.
Your sources are nonsense.
It's like me posting some obscure blog where someone says 'glen beck, GW and Rush are all involved in a love triangle they invited Sadaam but he rebuffed them, hence the Iraq war.' It's true i was drinking starbucks when they told me!
Your analogy isn't even remotely similar to the Obama one. Obama denied hearing any racist or anti-semetic talk from a man whose sermons he attended for TWENTY YEARS, despite there being numerous video/audio tapes of said man spewing this exact kind of stuff.
It's not a stretch at all to assume Obama's not being truthful on it.
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Bill Ayers: “I wrote Dreams From My Father”
http://www.cdobs.com/archive/from-blogs/bill-ayers-i-wrote-dreams-from-my-father,73125
Anne Leary 6 October 2009 6 Comments
There I was, sitting in Reagan National Monday morning, sipping a Starbucks by the United counter before going through security. I had a little time, so I was browsing through the news. Some military guys had borrowed a chair from my table. I looked up from time to time to enjoy the sun streaming through. That’s when I saw Bill Ayers, an instant blight. Scruffy, thinning beard, dippy earring, and the wirerims, heading to order. I gathered my things, got my camera ready, and snapped a shot right when he got his coffee.
I asked–what are you doing in D.C. Mr. Ayers?
For a moment I thought he might be on my flight back to Chicago. Charming. Initially I guess he thought I was laying claim to his coffee or something. He gave me an uneasy cheesy smile when he realized I was taking his picture. I asked him if he was speaking at GW? (Only I said GFW, guess I had the VFW on my mind) He said oh you mean GW, he said no…was trying to decide if I was a fan, then said he was giving a lecture in Arlington to a Renaissance group on education–that’s what I do, education–you shouldn’t believe everything you hear about me, you know nothing about me. I said, I know plenty–I’m from Chicago, a conservative blogger, and I’ll post this. (Oh, yeah, Bill Ayers, quite the Renaissance man, nail-bomber extraordinaire. Gee, I see another friend of Barack, U.S. Sec. of Education Arne Duncan was there too. “The conference theme is “A Time for Reflection, Celebration and Rebirth.” How touching. At best, useless, at worst, so wrong.)
Then, unprompted he said–I wrote Dreams From My Father. I said, oh, so you admit it. He said–Michelle asked me to. I looked at him. He seemed eager. He’s about my height, short. He went on to say–and if you can prove it, we can split the royalties. So I said, stop pulling my leg. Horrible thought. But he came again–I really wrote it, the wording was similar. I said I believe you probably heavily edited it. He said–I wrote it. I said–why would I believe you, you’re a liar.
He had no answer to that. Just looked at me. Then he turned and walked off, and said again his bit about my proving it and splitting the proceeds.
But the question remains–is Barack Obama a fraud? Is his myth-making creation and only major accomplishment a product of Bill Ayers’ imagination? (or his own) Is our President Barack Obama’s biography written by an unrepentant domestic terrorist?
Perhaps I’ll become Bill Ayers’ favorite conservative blogger and he can prove his authorship himself–turn over your notes Bill. And how about turning yourself in for your crimes.
I remember that era, Mr. Ayers. People died because of your actions, including your girlfriend. More would have if you had been more successful. And yet you have the gall to teach the teachers of our young. I won’t forget your murderous intent, your shameful acts, your contemptible lies and evasions. And when history is written, I hope you’ll be reviled–or forgotten.
As for our President, the verdict is still out. But Barack Obama called Bill Ayers friend and colleague for years. That in itself makes a damning statement.
Read more from Anne Leary at Backyard Conservative
________________________ ________________________ __________
The plot thickens.
come on 333...youre an attorney...
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I said the plot thickens. This could be nonsense, but Andersens' book still has not been disputed.
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If the source is attributing the quote to Aeyers himself or to Michelle Obama herself, why is there such an uproar over the validity of the source?
If these attributions were false, why wouldn't Ayers or Michelle Obama simply say so?
And BTW 240, comparing standards of proof from a legal stand point-- that depends if we are in civil court (preponderance of the evidence standard aka more likely than not 51%-49%) versus criminal court which is beyond a reasonable doubt (which is closer to 75%-25%). So, were these statements more likely than not made? I lean toward yes because there is no evidence to the contrary. Were these statements made beyond a reasonable doubt? Nope. There isn't an overwhelming amount of evidence which suggests the statements were made.
In this situation, there is no "hearsay" because there is no court room. Hearsay by definition is an out of court statement offered in court to prove the truth of the matter asserted. However, if we were in court and say Michelle Obama or Bill Aeyers was suing one of these writers for defamation (which is nearly impossible to do for two public figures unless actual malice can be shown) the statements would still be admissible non-hearsay under the Party Admission Exception/ Exemption ( depending if we are in federal or state court). The rationale being that a party to the lawsuit ( Obama/ Aeyers) is present in court and can refute the testimony given by the defendant in any number of ways during cross examination or by presenting extrinsic evidence that disproves the statements were made.
If the writers had cited an imaginary anonomyus source or something of that nature, then naturally I would be skeptical. However, when you name your source, its kind of hard to knock the writers credibility-- especially when the source refuses to confirm or deny the statements were made.
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But if obama sued the guy for the lie, it would only legitimize him.
Then you'd have 1000 authors and bloggers coming out the next day saying "Obama admitted to me..." in hopes people will pay attention to them.
And if obama doesn't deny every single instance, people can just assume it's thr truth?
I can't believe anyone here would buy this story... obama's buddy whispers to a right-wing blogger, then tap dances into the night. Sorry, I'm not buying it.
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And if obama doesn't deny every single instance, people can just assume it's thr truth?
You were using essentially the same logic just a week or so ago about Rumsfeld. Just because he didn't correct himself when he misspoke, issue a retraction/denial, etc. Suppose when it suits your beliefs, though, using that line of logic is totally rational...
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You were using essentially the same logic just a week or so ago about Rumsfeld. Just because he didn't correct himself when he misspoke, issue a retraction/denial, etc. Suppose when it suits your beliefs, though, using that line of logic is totally rational...
haha well, I think since the debris field is 8 miles long, Rummy's statement seems to support the facts in that particular case ;)
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come on 333...youre an attorney...
YOUR AN ATTORNEY!!
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YOUR AN ATTORNEY!!
YOU CAN READ??
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YOUR AN ATTORNEY!!
Is that a question or a statement?
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But if obama sued the guy for the lie, it would only legitimize him.
Then you'd have 1000 authors and bloggers coming out the next day saying "Obama admitted to me..." in hopes people will pay attention to them.
And if obama doesn't deny every single instance, people can just assume it's thr truth?
I can't believe anyone here would buy this story... obama's buddy whispers to a right-wing blogger, then tap dances into the night. Sorry, I'm not buying it.
again this coming from a man who bought into the palins child is really her daughters child and that b/c the nat enq said she cheated on her husband it had to be true. ::)
ABSOLUTELY BRUTAL DOUBLE STANDARD
Also to sue for libel of a public figure the person has to be able to prove that either the person knew the statement was false before hand or that they had a reckless disregard for the truth...
Again suing successfully for libel as a public figure is damn near impossible this is why you dont see law suits flying around all the time with the nat enq or other such tabloids...
go educate yourself and stop with your double standards ::)
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And if obama doesn't deny every single instance, people can just assume it's thr truth?
And yet, the opposite applies to Palin when her little supporters are challenged about any claim Levi makes.
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Fuck bill Ayers, he's a piece of shit domestic terrorist, and should not be breathing free air. Actually he shouldn't be breathing at all. Just the fact that the POTUS can be associated with the fucker in any way is completely disgusting. And to top it all of this asshole is a professor, teaching college kids.
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Ayers admits (again) he wrote Obama bio Weather Underground terrorist...
wnd ^ | March 26, 2011 11:31 pm Eastern | Jerome R. Corsi
Weather Underground terrorist speaks to new generation of SDS
NEW YORK – Bill Ayers has once again suggested he was the author of Barack Obama's celebrated autobiography, even though the admission could be explained away as a mocking irony designed only to goad Ayers's critics by yet another false admission he was the president's ghostwriter.
At the conclusion of a speech sponsored by the Students for a Democratic Society at Montclair State University in New Jersey, the former Weather Underground bomber gleefully claimed credit for writing Obama's "Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance."
As shown in a video clip on YouTube, Ayers responding to a question about "Dreams," said, "Did you know that I wrote it, incidentally?"
(Excerpt) Read more at wnd.com ...
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Ayers admits (again) he wrote Obama bio Weather Underground terrorist...
wnd ^ | March 26, 2011 11:31 pm Eastern | Jerome R. Corsi
Weather Underground terrorist speaks to new generation of SDS
NEW YORK – Bill Ayers has once again suggested he was the author of Barack Obama's celebrated autobiography, even though the admission could be explained away as a mocking irony designed only to goad Ayers's critics by yet another false admission he was the president's ghostwriter.
At the conclusion of a speech sponsored by the Students for a Democratic Society at Montclair State University in New Jersey, the former Weather Underground bomber gleefully claimed credit for writing Obama's "Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance."
As shown in a video clip on YouTube, Ayers responding to a question about "Dreams," said, "Did you know that I wrote it, incidentally?"
(Excerpt) Read more at wnd.com ...
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3333 - wanna buy a bridge?
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Did you see cashills recent work on this?
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Obama's mil admitted ayeres wrote a lot of that book when obama was broke and had blown the advance money and was being pressured to fiinish the book by a deadline.
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Did you see cashills recent work on this?
you've posted it before
think about this for a moment
you're an attorney right?
If Ayers really wrote the thing and wanted compensation all he has to do is hire a lawyer rather than offering the opportunity to share in the royalties with some idiot who asks him a question
he's obviously just getting a kick out of putting on suckers like you who want to believe every crazy thing you hear about Obama
btw - if Ayers wrote the book then that throws a bit of a monkey wrench into D'Souza insane CT which you've also swallowed hook, line and sinker
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Obama's mil admitted ayeres wrote a lot of that book when obama was broke and had blown the advance money and was being pressured to fiinish the book by a deadline.
what does "Obama's mil" mean?
why would Ayers work for free?
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Mother in law.
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The mother in law thing was reported in chris andersons' book.
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The mother in law thing was reported in chris andersons' book.
wow - scathing evidence there
why don't you contact that POS Ayers and offer to represent him in getting royalties from Obama
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I didnt say it was proof, I just said the plot thickens.
BTW - has Obama ever denied any of these claims or those of Andersen in his new book?
No!
lmao
this fuckin "guy"
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lmao
this fuckin "guy"
Chris Anderson is a obama fan ad in his reporting said the MIL admitted ayeres heled out finish the book cause barry blew through the advance and the publisher was coming after him.
Cashill also just penned a piece noting the glaring similarities between ayeres writings and dreams from my father.
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Chris Anderson is a obama fan ad in his reporting said the MIL admitted ayeres heled out finish the book cause barry blew through the advance and the publisher was coming after him.
Cashill also just penned a piece noting the glaring similarities between ayeres writings and dreams from my father.
have you ever taken an argument class.. modus tollens, modus pones etc?..
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have you ever taken an argument class.. modus tollens, modus pones etc?..
Sorry Mal - since your messiah wont come clean on anything the bestwe can do is amass evidence whereever it can be found.
And as of now - there is a lot of evidence that Obama did not wrote dreams from my father.
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BBBOOOOMMMMM
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Sorry Mal - since your messiah wont come clean on anything the bestwe can do is amass evidence whereever it can be found.
And as of now - there is a lot of evidence that Obama did not wrote dreams from my father.
im just asking a question.. i swear you offering more proof everyday that you are a middle aged woman. You can ever answer a question straight. Jump to conclusions when a simple question is asked. Frequent change of subject. Gay sarcasam..
i asked a simple question.. have you ever taken an argument class
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im just asking a question.. i swear you offering more proof everyday that you are a middle aged woman. You can ever answer a question straight. Jump to conclusions when a simple question is asked. Frequent change of subject. Gay sarcasam..
i asked a simple question.. have you ever taken an argument class
::) ::) ::)
I am not the issue.
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::) ::) ::)
I am not the issue.
i just asked a question.. again.. have you taken an argument class.. quit trying to dilute and reduce everything down to mush.. just answer the question... have you ever taken an argument class and are you familiar with the fallicies
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i just asked a question.. again.. have you taken an argument class.. quit trying to dilute and reduce everything down to mush.. just answer the question... have you ever taken an argument class and are you familiar with the fallicies
You mean like obama being a Con Law scholar, a genius, or a NBC?
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You mean like obama being a Con Law scholar, a genius, or a NBC?
lol for the 4th time.. have you ever taken an argument class...modus tollens. modus pones.. and are you familiar with the fallacies
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lol for the 4th time.. have you ever taken an argument class...modus tollens. modus pones.. and are you familiar with the fallacies
Hery dipshit - I try fucking cases for a living you moron.
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Hery dipshit - I try fucking cases for a living you moron.
ok then you are understand the argument from authority right?... and calm your punk ass down with the name calling bitch..
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ok then you are understand the argument from authority right?... and calm your punk ass down with the name calling bitch..
Like I said - since obama wont come clean on anything whatsoever, we have to go with the best evidence around.
And so far - its not looking pretty for the messiah who day by day is being shown for the inept, incompetent, ignorant, and a fiction of the msm tailor make for the idiots wh fall for such nonsense.
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October 17, 2008
Evidence Mounts: Ayers Co-Wrote Obama's Dreams
By Jack Cashill
See also: Who Wrote Dreams from my Father?
Evidence continues to mount that Barack Obama had substantial help from Bill Ayers in the creation of his 1995 book, Dreams From My Father, a book that Time Magazine has called "the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician." The evidence falls into five general categories, here summarized.
•The discovery of new matching nautical metaphors from both Ayers and Obama that almost assuredly came from the same source: Ayers, a former merchant seaman.
•The discovery of a Bill Ayers' essay on memoir writing, whose postmodern themes and phrases are echoed throughout Dreams.
•A newly discovered book chapter from 1990 that shows clearly and painfully the limits of Obama's prose style the year he received a contract to write Dreams.
•The revelation by radical Islamicist Rashid Khalidi that Ayers made his "dining room table" available for neighborhood writers who needed help.
•A refined timeline that shows Ayers had the means, the motive and the time to help Obama when he needed it most.
The timeline
A 1990 New York Times profile on Obama's election as the Harvard Law Review's first black president in 1990 caught the eye of agent Jane Dystel. She persuaded Poseidon, a small imprint of Simon & Schuster, to authorize a roughly $125,000 advance for Obama's proposed memoir.
Obama repaired to Chicago with advance in hand and dithered. At one point, in order to finish the book without interruption, he and wife Michelle decamped to Bali. Obama was supposed to have finished the book within a year. Bali or not, advance or no, he could not. Simon & Schuster canceled the contract. His agent hustled him a new, smaller contract.
Ayers published his book To Teach in 1993. Between 1993 and 1996, he had no other formal authorial assignment than to co-edit a collection of essays. This was an unusual hole in his very busy publishing career.
Obama's memoir was published in June 1995. Earlier that year, Ayers helped Obama, then a junior lawyer at a minor law firm, get appointed chairman of the multi-million dollar Chicago Annenberg Challenge grant. In the fall of that same year, 1995, Ayers and his wife, Weatherwoman Bernardine Dohrn, helped blaze Obama's path to political power with a fundraiser in their Chicago home.
In short, Ayers had the means, the motive, the time, the place and the literary ability to jumpstart Obama's career. And, as Ayers had to know, a lovely memoir under Obama's belt made for a much better resume than an unfulfilled contract over his head.
Neighborhood assistance
Allow me to reconstruct how Obama transformed himself into what the New York Times has called "that rare politician who can write . . . and write movingly and genuinely about himself." There is an element of speculation in this, but new evidence continues to narrow the gap between the speculative and the conclusive. One clue comes from an unexpected source, Rashid Khalidi, the radical Arab-American friend of Obama's and reputed ally of the PLO.
In the acknowledgment section of his 2004 book, Resurrecting Empire, Khalidi writes of Ayers, "Bill was particularly generous in letting me use his family's dining room table to do some writing for the project." Khalidi did not need the table. He had one of his own. He needed the help.
Khalidi had spent several years at Chicago University's Center for International Studies. At a 2003 farewell dinner on the occasion of his departure from Chicago, Obama toasted him, thanking him and his wife for the many dinners that they had shared as well as for his "consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases."
Chicago's Hyde Park was home to a tight, influential radical community at whose center were Ayers and Dohrn. In this world, the Ayers' terrorist rap sheet only heightened their reputation. Obama had to know. The couple had given up revolution in 1980 for the long slow march through the institutions. By 1994, if not earlier, Ayers saw a way to quicken that march.
I believe that after failing to finish his book on time, and after forfeiting his advance from Simon & Schuster, Obama brought a sprawling, messy, sophomoric manuscript to the famed dining room table of Bill Ayers and said, "Help."
Obama's limited skills
Obama needed all the help he could get. Prior to 1990, he had written very close to nothing. In 1981 Occidental College published two of Obama's poems-"Pop" and "Underground. Obama calls it some "very bad poetry," and he does not sell himself short. From "Underground":
Under water grottos, caverns
Filled with apes
That eat figs.
Stepping on the figs
That the apes
Eat, they crunch.
The apes howl, bare
Their fangs, dance . . .
It would be another decade before Obama had anything in print, and this only an edited, unsigned student case comment in the Harvard Law Review unearthed by Politico. Attorneys who reviewed the piece for Politico described it as "a fairly standard example of the genre."
Once elected president of the Harvard Law Review -- more of a popularity than a literary contest -- Obama contributed not one signed word to the HLR or any other law journal.
In 1990 Obama also contributed an essay to a book published by the University of Illinois at Springfield, an anthology called After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois.
Although the essay covers many of the issues raised in Dreams and uses some of the memoir's techniques, it does so without a hint of style, sophistication, or promise. The following two excerpts capture Obama's range or lack thereof:
"Moreover, such approaches can and have become thinly veiled excuses for cutting back on social programs, which are anathema to a conservative agenda."
"But organizing the black community faces enormous problems as well . . . and the urban landscape is littered with the skeletons of previous efforts."
These cliché-choked sentences go beyond the merely unpromising to the fully ungrammatical. "Organizing" does not "face." "Efforts" do not leave "skeletons." "Agendas" do not have "anathemas." Indeed, the essay is clunky, pedestrian, and wonkish, a B- paper in a freshman comp class.
In "Why Organize" Obama makes use of the fully re-created conversation, a technique used to somewhat better effect in Dreams. Here, his ungainly conjuring of black speech makes one cringe:
"I just cannot understand why a bright young man like you would go to college, get that degree and become a community organizer."
"Why's that?"
" 'Cause the pay is low, the hours is long, and don't nobody appreciate you."
To read "Why Organize" in its entirety is to understand the profound limits of Obama's literary talent. I am sure he sensed those limits if no one else did.
Postmodern themes
Bill Ayers' 2001 memoir Fugitive Days and Obama's Dreams From My Father follow oddly similar rules. Ayers describes his as "a memory book," one that deliberately blurs facts and changes identities and makes no claims at history. Obama says much the same. In Dreams, some characters are composites. Some appear out of precise chronology. Names have been changed.
Dreams and Fugitive Days are both suffused with repeated reference to lies, lying and what Ayers calls "our constructed reality." A serious student of literature, Ayers has written thoughtfully on the role of the first person narrator in the construction of a memoir.
In true postmodernist fashion, he rejects the possibility of an objective, universal truth. He argues instead that our lives are journeys, whose "narratives" we "construct" and, if we have the will and the power, impose on others.
Curiously, Obama says much the same in Dreams and in much the same language. "But another part of me knew that what I was telling them was a lie," writes Obama, "something I'd constructed from the scraps of information I'd picked up from my mother."
The evidence strongly suggests that Ayers transformed the stumbling literalist of "Why Organize" into the sophisticated postmodernist of Dreams, and he did not so not by tutoring Obama, but by rewriting his text. The Ayers' quotes that follow come from an essay of his, "Narrative Push/Narrative Pull." The Obama quotes come from Dreams:
Ayers:
"The hallmark of writing in the first person is intimacy. . . . But in narrative the universal is revealed through the specific, the general through the particular, the essence through the unique, and necessity is revealed through contingency."
Obama:
"And so what was a more interior, intimate effort on my part, to understand this struggle and to find my place in it, has converged with a broader public debate, a debate in which I am professionally engaged . . . "
Ayers:
"Narrative begins with something to say-content precedes form."
Obama:
"I understood that I had spent much of my life trying to rewrite these stories, plugging up holes in the narrative . . . "
Ayers:
"Narrative inquiry can be a useful corrective to all this."
Obama:
"Truth is usually the best corrective."
Ayers:
"The mind works in contradiction, and honesty requires the writer to reveal disputes with herself on the page."
Obama:
"Not because that past is particularly painful or perverse but because it speaks to those aspects of myself that resist conscious choice and that--on the surface, at least--contradict the world I now occupy."
Ayers:
The reader must actually see the struggle. It's a journey, not by a tourist, but by a pilgrim.
Obama:
"But all in all it was an intellectual journey that I imagined for myself, complete with maps and restpoints and a strict itinerary."
Ayers:
"Narrative writers strive for a personal signature, but must be aware that the struggle for honesty is constant."
Obama:
"I was engaged in a fitful interior struggle. I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America."
Ayers:
"But that intimacy can trap a writer into a defensive crouch, into airing grievances or self-justification."
Obama:
"At best, these things were a refuge; at worst, a trap."
Although I cite one example for each, Dreams offers many more. There are ten "trap" references alone and nearly as many for "narrative," "struggle," and "journey." To be sure, there are other postmodernists in Chicago, but few who write as stylishly and as intelligibly as Ayers and fewer who make their dining room tables available to would-be authors of a leftist bent.
The sea metaphors
A newly discovered anecdote from Bill Ayers' 1993 book, To Teach, solidifies the case that he is indeed the muse behind Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father.
In the book, Ayers tells the story of an adventurous teacher who would take her students out to the streets of New York to learn interesting life lessons about the culture and history of the city. As Ayers tells it, the students were fascinated by the Hudson River nearby and asked to see it. When they got to the river's edge, one student said, " Look, the river is flowing up." A second student said, "No, it has to flow south-down."
Not knowing which was right, the teacher and the students did their research. What they discovered, writes Ayers, was "that the Hudson River is a tidal river, that it flows both north and south, and they had visited the exact spot where the tide stops its northward push."
In his 1995 book, Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama shares a stunningly comparable anecdote about tidal rivers from his own brief New York sojourn. He tells of meeting with "Marty Kauffman" at a Lexington Avenue diner, the man from Chicago who was trying to recruit him as a community organizer.
After the meeting, Obama "took the long way home, along the East River promenade." As "a long brown barge rolled through the gray waters toward the sea," Obama sat down on a bench to consider his options. While sitting, he noticed a black woman and her young son against the railing. Overly fond of the too well remembered detail, Obama observes that "they stood side by side, his arm wrapped around her leg, a single silhouette against the twilight."
The boy appeared to ask his mother a question that she could not answer and then approached Obama: "Excuse me, mister," he shouted. "You know why sometimes the river runs that way and then sometimes it goes this way?"
"The woman smiled and shook her head, and I said it probably had to do with the tides." Obama uses the seeming indecisiveness of this tidal river as a metaphor for his own. Immediately afterwards, he shakes the indecision and heads for Chicago.
Even were there no other clues, Obama's frequent and sophisticated use of nautical metaphors like this one makes a powerful case for Ayers' involvement in the writing of Dreams. Despite growing up in Hawaii, Obama gives no indication than he has had any real experience with the sea or ships. Ayers, however, knew a great deal about the sea. After dropping out of college, he took up the life of a merchant seaman.
Although Ayers has tried to put his anxious ocean-going days behind him, the language of the sea will not let him go. "I realized that no one else could ever know this singular experience," Ayers writes of his maritime adventures. Yet curiously, much of this same nautical language flows through Obama's earth-bound memoir.
"Memory sails out upon a murky sea," Ayers writes at one point. Indeed, both he and Obama are obsessed with memory and its instability. The latter writes of its breaks, its blurs, its edges, its lapses. Obama also has a fondness for the word "murky" and its aquatic usages.
"The unlucky ones drift into the murky tide of hustles and odd jobs," he writes, one of four times "murky" appears in Dreams. Ayers and Obama also speak often of waves and wind, Obama at least a dozen times on wind alone. "The wind wipes away my drowsiness, and I feel suddenly exposed," he writes in a typical passage. Both also make conspicuous use of the word "flutter."
Not surprisingly, Ayers uses "ship" as a metaphor with some frequency. Early in the book he tells us that his mother is "the captain of her own ship," not a substantial one either but "a ragged thing with fatal leaks" launched into a "sea of carelessness." Obama too finds himself "feeling like the first mate on a sinking ship." He also makes a metaphorical reference to "a tranquil sea."
More intriguing is Obama's use of the word "ragged" as an adjective as in the highly poetic "ragged air" or "ragged laughter." Both books use "storms" and "horizons" both as metaphor and as reality. Ayers writes poetically of an "unbounded horizon," and Obama writes of "boundless prairie storms" and poetic horizons-"violet horizon," "eastern horizon," "western horizon."
Ayers often speaks of "currents" and "pockets of calm" as does Obama, who uses both as nouns as in "a menacing calm" or "against the current" or "into the current." The metaphorical use of the word "tangled" might also derive from one's nautical adventures. Ayers writes of his "tangled love affairs" and Obama of his "tangled arguments."
In Dreams, we read of the "whole panorama of life out there" and in Fugitive Days, "the whole weird panorama." Ayers writes of still another panorama, this one "an immense panorama of waste and cruelty." Obama employs the word "cruel" and its derivatives no fewer than fourteen times in Dreams.
On at least twelve occasions, Obama speaks of "despair," as in the "ocean of despair." Ayers speaks of a "deepening despair," a constant theme for him as well. Obama's "knotted, howling assertion of self" sounds like something from the pages of Jack London's The Sea Wolf.
My own semi-memoir, Sucker Punch, offers a useful control here too. The book makes no reference at all, metaphorical or otherwise, to ships, seas, oceans, calms, storms, wind, waves, horizons, panoramas, or to things howling, fluttering, knotted, ragged, tangled, or murky. None. And yet I have spent a good chunk of every summer of my life at the ocean.
If there is any one paragraph in Dreams that has convinced me of Ayers' involvement it is this one, in which Obama describes the black nationalist message:
"A steady attack on the white race . . . served as the ballast that could prevent the ideas of personal and communal responsibility from tipping into an ocean of despair."
As a writer, especially in the pre-Google era of Dreams, I would never have used a metaphor as specific as "ballast" unless I knew exactly what I was talking about. Seaman Ayers most surely did.
Why this matters
Obama's handlers have "constructed" his persona around his presumably superior intelligence. Bill Buckley's son Christopher, smitten by Obama's literary skills, is among those who have yielded to this imagery and joined the Obama crusade. Even if someone benign had ghostwritten the book it would present a problem for Obama.
The question is often asked why Obama associated with Ayers. The more appropriate question is why the powerful Ayers would associate with the then obscure Obama. Before Obama's ascendancy, it was Ayers who had the connections, the clout, and the street cred. Ayers could also write and write very well. By the mid-1990s he had had several of his books published. What Ayers could never do, however, was run for office on his own.
My suspicion is that Ayers saw the potential in Obama, and chose to mold it. The calculation in Dreams is palpable. Nothing about the book would deny a black Democrat the White House. If it were revealed that the ghostwriter is Ayers, it would suggest that Ayers has played a major role all along in the shaping of Barack Obama. It is unlikely that the McCain camp would have invested so much energy in establishing the Ayers-Obama link if they did not think this was the case.
At the end of the day, the observer is left with only two conclusions: either Barack Obama experienced a quantum surge in his writing skills almost overnight; or someone made a major contribution to the rewriting of his book.
The dispassionate observer has to choose the latter -- the former has no precedent. If he can endure the consequences, he concedes that that contributor had to be Bill Ayers.
See Jack Cashill's first American Thinker article on the authorship of Dreams from my Father here.
96 Comments on "Evidence Mounts: Ayers Co-Wrote Obama's Dreams"
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October 09, 2008
Who Wrote Dreams From My Father?
By Jack Cashill
wwwamericanthinker.com
Prior to 1990, when Barack Obama contracted to write Dreams From My Father, he had written very close to nothing. Then, five years later, this untested 33 year-old produced what Time Magazine has called -- with a straight face -- "the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician."
The public is asked to believe Obama wrote Dreams From My Father on his own, almost as though he were some sort of literary idiot savant. I do not buy this canard for a minute, not at all. Writing is as much a craft as, say, golf. To put this in perspective, imagine if a friend played a few rounds in the high 90s and then a few years later, without further practice, made the PGA Tour. It doesn't happen.
And yet, given the biases of the literary establishment, no reviewer of note has so much as questioned Obama's role in the writing, then or now. As the New York Times gushed, Obama was "that rare politician who can write . . . and write movingly and genuinely about himself." These accolades matter all the more because Obama has built his political persona around his presumably superior intellect, Dreams being exhibit A.
Shy of a confession by those involved, I will not be able to prove conclusively that Obama did not write this book. As shall be seen, however, there are only two real possibilities: one is that Obama experienced a near miraculous turnaround in his literary abilities; the second is that he had major editorial help, up to and including a ghostwriter.
The weight of the evidence overwhelming favors the latter conclusion and strongly suggests who that ghostwriter is. In that this remains something of a work in progress, I am willing to test my hypothesis against any standard of proof and appreciate any and all good leads.
In my career in advertising and publishing, I have reviewed the portfolios of a thousand professional writers, all of them crowded with writing samples, but only a handful of these writers would have been capable of having a written a book as stylish as Dreams. I have also written a book on intellectual fraud, Hoodwinked, and examined any number of bogus biographies that excited the literary left to the point of complicity, Edward Said's and Rigoberta Menchu's prominent among them, Menchu winning a Nobel Prize for hers. Obama's ascent seems to follow a century-old pattern.
Tracing Obama's literary ascent is complicated by what Politico.com calls a "scant paper trail." That trail begins at Occidental College whose literary magazine published two of Obama's poems -- "Pop" and "Underground" -- in 1981. Obama calls it some "very bad poetry," and he does not sell himself short. From "Underground":
Under water grottos, caverns
Filled with apes
That eat figs.
Stepping on the figs
That the apes
Eat, they crunch.
The apes howl, bare
Their fangs, dance . . .
It would be another decade before Obama had anything in print and this an edited, unsigned student case comment in the Harvard Law Review unearthed by Politico. Attorneys who reviewed the piece for Politico described it as "a fairly standard example of the genre."
Of note, Politico reporters Ben Smith and Jeffrey Resner observe that "the temperate legal language doesn't display the rhetorical heights that run through his memoir, published a few years later."
Once elected president of the Harvard Law Review --more of a popularity than a literary contest -- Obama contributed not one signed word to the HLR or any other law journal. As Matthew Franck has pointed out in National Review Online, "A search of the HeinOnline database of law journals turns up exactly nothing credited to Obama in any law review anywhere at any time."
A 1990 New York Times profile on Obama's election as Harvard's first black president caught the eye of agent Jane Dystel. She persuaded Poseidon, a small imprint of Simon & Schuster, to authorize a roughly $125,000 advance for Obama's proposed memoir.
With advance in hand, Obama repaired to Chicago where he dithered. At one point, in order to finish without interruption, he and wife Michelle decamped to Bali. Obama was supposed to have finished the book within a year. Bali or not, advance or no, he could not. He was surely in way over his head.
According to a surprisingly harsh 2006 article by liberal publisher Peter Osnos, which detailed the "ruthlessness" of Obama's literary ascent, Simon & Schuster canceled the contract. Dystel did not give up. She solicited Times Book, the division of Random House at which Osnos was publisher. He met with Obama, took his word that he could finish the book, and authorized a new advance of $40,000.
Then suddenly, somehow, the muse descended on Obama and transformed him from a struggling, unschooled amateur, with no paper trail beyond an unremarkable legal note and a poem about fig-stomping apes, into a literary superstar.
To be sure, it is not unusual for successful politicians to hire ghostwriters -- John McCain gives due credit to Mark Salter for his memoir, Faith of My Fathers -- but it is highly unusual for unknown young Chicago lawyers to hire ghostwriters.
I have attempted to contact Dystel by phone and email without success. It is highly unlikely she refashioned the book, and Osnos admittedly did not. If my suspicions are correct, the ghost on this book shared many of Obama's sentiments, spoke his language and spent considerable time reworking the text.
I bought Bill Ayers' 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days, for reasons unrelated to this project. As I discovered, he writes surprisingly well and very much like "Obama." In fact, my first thought was that the two may have shared the same ghostwriter. Unlike Dreams, however, where the high style is intermittent, Fugitive Days is infused with the authorial voice in every sentence. What is more, when Ayers speaks, even off the cuff, he uses a cadence and vocabulary consistent with his memoir. One does not hear any of Dreams in Obama's casual speech.
Obama's memoir was published in June 1995. Earlier that year, Ayers helped Obama, then a junior lawyer at a minor law firm, get appointed chairman of the multi-million dollar Chicago Annenberg Challenge grant. In the fall of that same year, 1995, Ayers and his wife, Weatherwoman Bernardine Dohrn, helped blaze Obama's path to political power with a fundraiser in their Chicago home.
In short, Ayers had the means, the motive, the time, the place and the literary ability to jumpstart Obama's career. And, as Ayers had to know, a lovely memoir under Obama's belt made for a much better resume than an unfulfilled contract over his head.
For simplicity sake, I will refer to the author of Dreams as "Obama." Without question, he contributed much of the book's raw material, especially the long-winded accounting of events and conversations, polished just well enough to pass muster. The book's fierce, succinct and tightly coiled social analysis more closely matches the style of Fugitive Days, a much tighter book.
Ayers and Obama have a good deal in common. In the way of background, both grew up in comfortable white households and have struggled to find an identity as righteous black men ever since. Just as Obama resisted "the pure and heady breeze of privilege" to which he was exposed as a child, Ayers too resisted "white skin privilege" or at least tried to.
"I also thought I was black," says Ayers only half-jokingly. As proof of his righteousness, Ayers named his first son "Malik" after the newly Islamic Malcolm X and the second son "Zayd" after Zayd Shakur, a Black Panther killed in a shootout that claimed the life of a New Jersey State Trooper.
Tellingly, Ayers, like Obama, began his career as a self-described "community organizer," Ayers in inner-city Cleveland, Obama in inner-city Chicago. In short, Ayers was fully capable of crawling inside Obama's head and relating in superior prose what the Dreams' author calls a "rage at the white world [that] needed no object."
Indeed, in Dreams, it is on the subject of black rage that Obama writes most eloquently. Phrases like "full of inarticulate resentments," "unruly maleness," "unadorned insistence on respect" and "withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage" lace the book.
In Fugitive Days, "rage" rules and in high style as well. Ayers tells of how his "rage got started" and how it evolved into an "uncontrollable rage -- fierce frenzy of fire and lava." Indeed, the Weathermen's inaugural act of mass violence was the "Days of Rage" in 1969 Chicago.
As in Chicago, that rage led Ayers to a sentiment with which Obama was altogether familiar, "audacity!" Ayers writes, "I felt the warrior rising up inside of me -- audacity and courage, righteousness, of course, and more audacity." This is one of several references.
The combination of audacity and rage has produced two memoirs that follow oddly similar rules. Ayers describes his as "a memory book," one that deliberately blurs facts and changes identities and makes no claims at history. Obama says much the same. In Dreams, some characters are composites. Some appear out of precise chronology. Names have been changed.
As a control, allow me to introduce my own book, Sucker Punch, which is no small part a memoir about race, specifically in my relationship, at great remove, with Muhammad Ali and the world of boxing. In the book, I describe my own unreconstructed coming of age in racially charged Newark, New Jersey as it happened. I change no names, create no composite characters, alter no chronologies. Most memoirs observe the same conventions. Dreams and Fugitive Days, however, are both suffused with repeated reference to lies, lying and what Ayers calls, in his pitch perfect post-modern patois, "our constructed reality."
"But another part of me knew that what I was telling them was a lie," writes Obama, "something I'd constructed from the scraps of information I'd picked up from my mother."
"That whole first year seemed like one long lie," Obama writes of his first year in college in Los Angeles, one of at least a dozen references to lies and lying in "Dreams," a figure nearly matched in "Fugitive Days."
The reader knows that Ayers -- with some justification -- has much to hide. He senses that Obama does too, but he is never quite sure why. This presumed poetic license leads to the frequent manipulation of dates to make a political point.
"I saw a dead body once, as I said, when I was ten, during the Korean War," writes Ayers. This correlation is important enough that Ayers mentions it twice. The only problem is that Ayers was eight when the Korean War ended.
Obama tells us that when he was ten, he and his family visited the mainland. On the trip, back in their motel room, they watched the Watergate Hearings on TV. The problem, of course, is that those hearing started just before Obama turned twelve.
One could forgive a single missed date, but inconsistent dates and numbers appear frequently in both books and often reinforce some moment of lost innocence. In the same spirit, both books abound in detail too closely remembered and conversations too well recorded. These moments in both books occasionally lead to an awareness of the nation's seemingly ineradicable racism.
In 1970, for instance, the 9-year-old Obama alleges to be visiting the American embassy Indonesia. While waiting, he chances upon "a collection of Life magazines neatly displayed in clear plastic binders."
In one magazine, he reads a story about a black man with an "uneven, ghostly hue," who has been rendered grotesque by a chemical treatment. "There were thousands of people like him," Obama learned, "black men and women back in America who'd undergone the same treatment in response to advertisements that promised happiness as a white person."
Obama's attention to detail is a ruse. Life never ran such an article. When challenged, Obama claimed it was Ebony. Ebony ran no such article either. Besides, black was beautiful in 1970.
In a similar vein, Ayers tells of hitching a ride in Missouri with "Bud," the driver of a "brand-new Peterbilt truck." The man proceeds to regale Ayers with a string of dirty jokes -- at least two of them retold word for word -- before reaching under his seat and pulling out a large pistol, his "N****r neutralizer."
"White people can never quite remember the scope and scale of the slavocracy," Ayers reminds the reader again and again, writing as though he were not a member of this benighted race.
These parallels intrigue perhaps, but they prove little. To add a little science to the analysis, I identified two similar "nature" passages in Obama's and Ayers' respective memoirs, the first from Fugitive Days:
"I picture the street coming alive, awakening from the fury of winter, stirred from the chilly spring night by cold glimmers of sunlight angling through the city."
The second from Dreams:
"Night now fell in midafternoon, especially when the snowstorms rolled in, boundless prairie storms that set the sky close to the ground, the city lights reflected against the clouds."
These two sentences are alike in more than their poetic sense, their length and their gracefully layered structure. They tabulate nearly identically on the Flesch Reading Ease Score (FRES), something of a standard in the field.
The "Fugitive Days" excerpt scores a 54 on reading ease and a 12th grade reading level. The "Dreams'" excerpt scores a 54.8 on reading ease and a 12th grade reading level. Scores can range from 0 to 121, so hitting a nearly exact score matters.
A more reliable data-driven way to prove authorship goes under the rubric "cusum analysis" or QSUM. This analysis begins with the measurement of sentence length, a significant and telling variable. To compare the two books, I selected thirty-sentence sequences from Dreams and Fugitive Days, each of which relates the author's entry into the world of "community organizing."
"Fugitive Days" averaged 23.13 words a sentence. "Dreams" averaged 23.36 words a sentence. By contrast, the memoir section of "Sucker Punch" averaged 15 words a sentence.
Interestingly, the 30-sentence sequence that I pulled from Obama's conventional political tract, Audacity of Hope, averages more than 29 words a sentence and clocks in with a 9th grade reading level, three levels below the earlier cited passages from "Dreams" and "Fugitive Days." The differential in the Audacity numbers should not surprise. By the time it was published in 2006, Obama was a public figure of some wealth, one who could afford editors and ghost writers.
The publisher of Dreams, the openly liberal Peter Osnos, tells how this came to be. According to Osnos, Dreams took off during Obama's much-publicized race for the U.S. Senate in 2004, nearly ten years after its modest release. After winning the election, Obama dumped his devoted long time agent, Jane Dystel, and signed a seven-figure deal with Crown, using only a by-the-hour attorney.
Obama pulled off the deal before being sworn in as Senator, this way to avoid the disclosure and reporting requirements applicable to members of Congress. To his credit, Osnos publicly scolds Obama for his "ruthlessness" and "his questionable judgment about using public service as a personal payday."
Unfortunately, the technology is not currently available to do a fully reliable authorship analysis. As expert in the field Patrick Juola of Duquesne University observed, “The accuracy simply isn't there.” He cautioned that for high stakes issues like this one, “The repercussions of a technical error could be a disaster (in either direction).”
That much said, preliminary QSUM analysis supports an Ayers-Obama link. Systems designer Ed Gold--with twenty years of high-level experience in image and signal processing, pattern recognition, and classifier design and implementation--volunteered to run a QSUM scan on multiple excerpts from both memoirs. “I have completed the analysis,” he wrote me, “and I think you will be pleased with the findings.” In assessing the signature of sample passages from Dreams, he found “a very strong match to all of the Ayers samples that I processed.”
Like Juola, Gold recognized the limitations of the process and of his own resources. He has volunteered to make the raw data available to more established authorship authentication experts, and I will be happy to pass that data along. Gold saw the complementary value, however, in text analysis, as did Juola, who encouraged me “to do what you're already doing . . . good old-fashioned literary detective work.”
Given that advice, I dug deeper into both memoirs and established one metaphoric thread that ties the two books together in a way I believe is just shy of conclusive, a thread that leads back to Bill Ayers's stint, after dropping out of college, as a merchant seaman.
"I'd thought that when I signed on that I might write an American novel about a young man at sea," says Ayers in his memoir, Fugitive Days, "but I didn't have it in me."
The experience had a powerful impact on Ayers. Years later, he would recall a nightmare he had while crossing the Atlantic, "a vision of falling overboard in the middle of the ocean and swimming as fast as I could as the ship steamed off and disappeared over the horizon."
Although Ayers has tried to put his anxious ocean-going days behind him, the language of the sea will not let him go. "I realized that no one else could ever know this singular experience," Ayers writes of his maritime adventures. Yet curiously, much of this same nautical language flows through Obama's earth-bound memoir.
"Memory sails out upon a murky sea," Ayers writes at one point. Indeed, both he and Obama are obsessed with memory and its instability. The latter writes of its breaks, its blurs, its edges, its lapses. Obama also has a fondness for the word "murky" and its aquatic usages.
"The unlucky ones drift into the murky tide of hustles and odd jobs," he writes, one of four times "murky" appears in Dreams. Ayers and Obama also speak often of waves and wind, Obama at least a dozen times on wind alone. "The wind wipes away my drowsiness, and I feel suddenly exposed," he writes in a typical passage. Both also make conspicuous use of the word "flutter."
Not surprisingly, Ayers uses "ship" as a metaphor with some frequency. Early in the book he tells us that his mother is "the captain of her own ship," not a substantial one either but "a ragged thing with fatal leaks" launched into a "sea of carelessness."
Obama too finds himself "feeling like the first mate on a sinking ship." He also makes a metaphorical reference to "a tranquil sea." More intriguing is Obama's use of the word "ragged" as an adjective as in the highly poetic "ragged air" or "ragged laughter."
Both books use "storms" and "horizons" both as metaphor and as reality. Ayers writes poetically of an "unbounded horizon," and Obama writes of "boundless prairie storms" and poetic horizons-"violet horizon," "eastern horizon," "western horizon."
Ayers often speaks of "currents" and "pockets of calm" as does Obama, who uses both as nouns as in "a menacing calm" or "against the current" or "into the current." The metaphorical use of the word "tangled" might also derive from one's nautical adventures. Ayers writes of his "tangled love affairs" and Obama of his "tangled arguments."
In Dreams, we read of the "whole panorama of life out there" and in Fugitive Days, "the whole weird panorama." Ayers writes of still another panorama, this one "an immense panorama of waste and cruelty." Obama employs the word "cruel" and its derivatives no fewer than fourteen times in Dreams.
On at least twelve occasions, Obama speaks of "despair," as in the "ocean of despair." Ayers speaks of a "deepening despair," a constant theme for him as well. Obama's "knotted, howling assertion of self" sounds like something from the pages of Jack London's "The Sea Wolf."
In Obama's defense, he did grow up in Hawaii. Still, the short Hawaii stretch of his memoir is largely silent on the island's natural appeal. Sucker Punch again offers a useful control. It makes no reference at all, metaphorical or otherwise, to ships, seas, oceans, calms, storms, wind, waves, horizons, panoramas, or to things howling, fluttering, knotted, ragged, tangled, or murky. None. And yet I have spent a good chunk of every summer of my life at the ocean.
If there is any one paragraph in Dreams that has convinced me of Ayers' involvement it is this one, in which Obama describes the Black Nationalist message:
"A steady attack on the white race... served as the ballast that could prevent the ideas of personal and communal responsibility from tipping into an ocean of despair."
As a writer, especially in the pre-Google era of Dreams, I would never have used a metaphor as specific as "ballast" unless I knew exactly what I was talking about. Seaman Ayers most surely did.
One more item of interest. In his 1997 book, A Kind and Just Parent, Bill Ayers walks the reader through his Hyde Park neighborhood and identifies the notable residents therein. Among them are Muhammad Ali, “Minister” Louis Farrakhan (of whom he writes fondly), “former mayor” Eugene Sawyer, “poets” Gwendolyn Brooks and Elizabeth Alexander, and “writer” Barack Obama.
In 1997, Obama was an obscure state senator, a lawyer, and a law school instructor with one book under his belt that had debuted two years earlier to little acclaim and lesser sales. In terms of identity, he had more in common with mayor Sawyer than poet Brooks. The “writer” identification seems forced and purposefully so, a signal perhaps to those in the know of a persona in the making that Ayers had himself helped forge.
None of this, of course, proves Ayers' authorship conclusively, but the evidence makes him a much more likely candidate than Obama to have written the best parts of Dreams.
The Obama camp could put all such speculation to rest by producing some intermediary sign of impending greatness -- a school paper, an article, a notebook, his Columbia thesis, his LSAT scores -- but Obama guards these more zealously than Saddam did his nuclear secrets. And I suspect, at the end of the day, we will pay an equally high price for Obama's concealment as Saddam's.
Jack Cashill is the author, among other books, of Hoodwinked: How Intellectual Hucksters Hijacked American Culture. He has a Ph.D. in American studies from Purdue University.
319 Comments on "Who Wrote Dreams From My Father?"
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The Obama camp could put all such speculation to rest by producing some intermediary sign of impending greatness -- a school paper, an article, a notebook, his Columbia thesis, his LSAT scores -- but Obama guards these more zealously than Saddam did his nuclear secrets. And I suspect, at the end of the day, we will pay an equally high price for Obama's concealment as Saddam's.
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333 - that article by Cahill was written before the 2008 election
why do you still care about this now? How is this any kind of relevent issue
It's f'ng hilarious how you and dopes like you are still getting suckered by Ayers
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333 - that article by Cahill was written before the 2008 election
why do you still care about this now? How is this any kind of relevent issue
It's f'ng hilarious how you and dopes like you are still getting suckered by Ayers
Again - you ignore the analysis and reality and attack the messenger. You have nothing left. Your messiah and emporer has been shown wth no clothes.
And my interest in this is based on the book by Cashill as well as the fact that Ayeres mentioned this again.
STRAW - NO COLLEGE TRANSCRIPTS, NO LAST, NO LAW REVEW ARTICLE, NO SCHOLARLY ARTICLES, NO JOURNAL ENTRIES, NO HIGH SCHOOL ARTICLES, NO COLLEGE THESIS, NOTHING AT ALL.
Yet - somehow you still believe Obama wrote this book and is otherwise a top notch author. got it. ::) ::)
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Andersen Book Blows Ayers' Cover on 'Dreams' (updated)
Jack Cashill
www.americanthinker.com
In his new book, "Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage," Best-selling celebrity journalist, Christopher Andersen, has blown a huge hole in the Obama genius myth without intending to do so.
Relying on inside sources, quite possibly Michelle Obama herself, Andersen describes how Dreams came to be published -- just as I had envisioned it in my articles on the authorship of Dreams. With the deadline pressing, Michelle recommended that Barack seek advice from "his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers."
To flesh out his family history, Obama had taped interviews with various family members. Andersen writes, "These oral histories, along with a partial manuscript and a truckload of notes, were given to Ayers." Andersen quotes a Hyde Park neighbor, "Everyone knew they were friends and that they worked on various projects together. It was no secret. Why would it be? People liked them both."
Andersen continues, "In the end, Ayers's contribution to Barack's Dreams From My Father would be significant--so much so that the book's language, oddly specific references, literary devices, and themes would bear a jarring similarity to Ayers's own writing."
More to come!
Update: Ron Radosh takes up the case.
Finally, Christopher Andersen concludes: "In the end, Ayers's contribution to Barack's Dreams From My Father would be significant - so much so that the book's language, oddly specific references, literary devices, and themes would bear a jarring similarity to Ayers's own writing."
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May 24, 2009
Who Wrote Dreams and Why It Matters
By Jack Cashill
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/05/who_wrote_dreams_and_why_it_ma_1.html
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While waiting for America's publishers to find their nerve, I had put my research into the authorship of Barack Obama's 1995 memoir Dreams From My Father on the back shelf. But then I heard Chris Matthews.
The Hardball host was weighing in on the subject of Sarah Palin's new book deal. "Sarah Palin - now don't laugh - is writing a book," sneered Matthews. "Not just reading a book, writing a book."
"Actually in the word of the publisher she's "collaborating" on a book," Matthews continued. "What an embarrassment! It's one of these ‘I told you,' books that jocks do. You know she's already declared, I mean, why they do it like this? ‘She can't write, we got a collaborator for her.'"
I dedicate what follows to Matthews and those willfully blind souls like him. It is a work in progress, a collective one at that, aided and abetted by nearly a score of volunteer co-conspirators from Hawaii to Ohio to Israel to Australia. The thesis is simple enough: Barack Obama needed substantial help to write his 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father. Moreover, unlike Sarah Palin, Obama chose to conceal the identity of his collaborator and not without good reason. To admit that he needed a collaborator would have undercut his campaign for president and to reveal the name of that collaborator would have ended it.
My involvement in this occasionally harrowing literary adventure began in July 2008, entirely innocently. A friend sent me some short excerpts from Dreams and asked if they were as radical as they sounded. I bought the book, located the excerpts, and reported back that, in context, the excerpts were not particularly troubling.
But I did notice something else. The book was much too well written. I had seen enough of Obama's interviews to know that he did not speak with anywhere near the verbal sophistication on display in Dreams.
About six weeks later, for entirely unrelated reasons, I picked up a copy of Bill Ayers 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days. Ayers, I discovered, writes very well and very much like "Obama."
In mid-September, after considerable digging, I wrote a few speculative articles for American Thinker and other online journals and discovered that I was not alone in my suspicions.
Looking for some scientific verification, I consulted Patrick Juola of Duquesne, a leading authority in the field of literary forensics. Juola, however, advised me against relying on computer analysis on a subject this sensitive. "The accuracy just isn't there," he told me. He encouraged me instead "to do what you're already doing . . . good old-fashioned literary detective work." I took his advice.
The first question I had to resolve was whether the 33 year-old Barack Obama was capable of writing what Time Magazine has called "the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician." The answer is almost assuredly "no."
In his bestselling study of success, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell painstakingly lays out what he calls the "ten-thousand-hour rule." Gladwell quotes neurologist Daniel Levitin to the effect that "ten thousand hours of practice [in any subject] is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert" and cites example after example to make his case.
Obama appears to have lopped about 9900 hours off that standard. In Dreams, he speaks of writing only the occasional journal entry and some "very bad poetry." He does not sell himself short on the poetry. From his undergraduate poem, "Underground":
Under water grottos, caverns
Filled with apes
That eat figs.
Stepping on the figs
That the apes
Eat, they crunch.
The apes howl, bare
Their fangs, dance . . .
If possible, Obama's early prose showed less promise than his poetry. Although the Obama camp has been notoriously shy about releasing proof of Obama's assumed genius-SAT scores, LSAT scores, transcripts, theses-I was able to unearth three essays in print that predate Dreams.
In March 1983, Obama wrote an 1800-word article, "Breaking the War Mentality," for Columbia University's weekly news magazine, Sundial. Five years later, he wrote an essay titled "Why Organize," which was reprinted in a 1990 book called After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois.
In the Sundial article there are an appalling five sentences in which the subject noun does not agree with the verb. In some sentences, like the following, the punctuation and word selection are as random as the grammar: "The belief that moribund institutions, rather than individuals are at the root of the problem, keep SAM's energies alive."
Although "Why Organize" seems to be better edited, in neither of these two clunky essays does Obama turn a single phrase that is clever, concise, or even vaguely memorable. In 1990, he wrote an unsigned student case comment for the Harvard Law Review. The prose here, although reasonably well edited, is even more dull and leaden.
It was not Obama's style but his election as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review in 1990-more of a popularity than a literary contest-that netted him a roughly $125,000 advance for a proposed book. According to a 2006 article by liberal publisher Peter Osnos, Simon & Schuster canceled the contract when Obama could not deliver, despite a sojourn to Bali to help him write.
It was about this time that Bill Ayers entered the picture. "I met [Obama] sometime in the mid-1990s." he would later tell Salon. "And everyone who knew him thought that he was politically ambitious. For the first two years, I thought, his ambition is so huge that he wants to be mayor of Chicago."
Obama needed help, and Ayers had the means, the motive, and the ability to provide it. Unlike Obama, he has a well-established paper trail. He co-authored the 1974 tract, "Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism, in which book, by the way, he misspells Frantz Fanon's first name as "Franz" just as Obama does in Dreams, and nearly twenty books thereafter as writer and editor.
Ayers, we know, provided an informal editing service for like-minded friends in the neighborhood. Aspiring radical Rashid Khalidi attests to this in the acknowledgements in his 2004 book, Resurrecting Empire. "Bill was particularly generous in letting me use his family's dining room table to do some writing for the project." Khalidi did not need the table. He had one of his own. He needed the help. Having no political ambitions, Khalidi was willing to acknowledge it.
Dreams was published in June 1995. That same year, Ayers was busy fueling the ambitions of his young protégé, first with an appointment to the chair of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge grant and later with a fundraiser in his Chicago home. Ayers admits that his "imagination ran out of steam." He thought he was launching a mayor that he could exploit, even control, not a president, who would move quickly beyond his grasp.
After Dreams was published in 1995, Obama's typewriter fell silent once again. He contributed not one signed word to any law journal or other publication of note until his unexceptional and conspicuously ghosted 2006 book, Audacity of Hope. Obama was not a writer. As his lame inaugural address proved, he still isn't.
It is possible that Obama actually met Ayers in New York in the early 1980s. In his brief New York sojourn, he often seems to be channeling the thoughts and experiences of the world weary Ayers who lived in New York the same years as Obama. "Like a tourist, I watched the range of human possibility on display," writes Obama in Dreams, "trying to trace out my future in the lives of the people I saw, looking for some opening through which I could re-enter."
Re-enter? This seems more the reflection of a soon to be ex-fugitive than that of a Columbia undergrad. It is in New York too that Obama feels himself living "behind enemy lines," the exact phrase that Ayers uses to describe his life in the underground.
The opening scene of Dreams takes place in the early 1980s in and around Obama's New York City apartment with its "slanting" floors. As the scene unfolds, Obama is making breakfast "with coffee on the stove and two eggs in the skillet." In Fugitive Days, Ayers inhabits an apartment with "sloping floors." He too cooks a lot -- his books are rich with often sensual food imagery -- and uses a "skillet," a southern regionalism.
Obama tells the reader that the buzzer downstairs did not work and that visitors had to call from a pay phone at the corner gas station. There, "A black Doberman the size of a wolf paced through the night in vigilant patrol, its jaws clamped around an empty beer bottle."
Fugitive Days opens at a pay phone. (Unless specified otherwise, all Ayers' references will be to Fugitive Days and Obama's to Dreams). Ayers spent much of his underground years waiting at pay phones. He writes about pay phones with the loving detail art critics reserve for Picassos. The vivid image of the Doberman almost assuredly comes from his experience. Obama had no reason to use that pay phone, if it even existed.
Obama shared his apartment with a roommate, who would scream "with impressive rage" at "white people" whose dogs pooped on their sidewalks. Adds Obama, ""We'd laugh at the faces of both master and beast, grim and unapologetic as they hunkered down to do the deed."
Both Ayers and Obama speak of "rage" the way that Eskimos do of snow -- in so many varieties, so often, that they feel the need to qualify it, here as "impressive rage," elsewhere in Dreams as "suppressed rage" or "coil of rage," and in Fugitive Days as "justifiable rage," "uncontrollable rage," "blind rage," "and, of course, "Days of Rage."
Another note of interest is that all of the distinctive words in the sentence above -- "master," "beast," "grim," "unapologetic," and "deed," as well as the phrase "hunkered down" -- appear in Fugitive Days.
In the opening pages, Obama makes an exception to his unlikely New York "solitude" for an elderly neighbor, a "stooped" gentleman who wore a "fedora." In Fugitive Days, it was Ayers' grandfather who is "stooped" and a helpful stranger who wears a "fedora."
One day, Obama's roommate finds his neighbor dead, "crumpled up on the third-floor landing, his eyes wide open, his limbs stiff and curled up like a baby's." Ayers tells of watching his mother die, "eyes half open, curled up and panting." In both cases, the eyes are "open" and the body is "curled up."
On the neighbor's mantelpiece, Obama reports seeing "the faded portrait of a woman with heavy eyebrows and a gentle smile." There are seven references to "eyebrows" in Dreams -- heavy ones, bushy ones, wispy ones, and six in Fugitive Days -- bushy ones, flaring ones, arched ones, black ones.
Who writes about eyebrows? In the lengthy excerpts that I have gathered from a half dozen other contemporary political memoirs -- 150,000 words in all -- there is no mention of "eyebrows" at all. Nor is there anyone or anything "stooped," "curled," "crumpled," "hunkered down," or wearing a "fedora."
At the climax of the opening sequence, Obama receives a phone call. It comes from an African aunt. "Listen, Barry, your father is dead," she tells him. Obama has a hard time understanding. "Can you hear me?" she repeats. "I say, your father is dead." The line is cut, and the conversation ends abruptly.
The opening sequence of Fugitive Days climaxes in nearly identical fashion. This phone call comes from Ayers' future wife, Bernardine Dohrn. "Diana is dead," says Dohrn of Ayers' lover Diana Oughton, killed in a bomb blast. Ayers has a hard time understanding. "Diana is dead," she "repeats slowly." Ayers drops the line, and the conversation ends abruptly.
At the conclusion of Dreams' opening scene, a stunned Obama "sat down on the couch, smelling eggs burn in the kitchen, staring at cracks in the plaster, trying to measure my loss." This passage features Obama's signature rhetorical flourish, the triple parallel without a joining conjunction. There are scores of such examples throughout Dreams, perhaps hundreds:
"...the mixed blood, the divided soul, the ghostly image of the tragic mulatto trapped between two worlds."
"Her face powdered, her hips girdled, her thinning hair bolstered, she would board the six-thirty bus to arrive at her downtown office before anyone else."
"...his eyes were closed, his head leaning against the back of his chair, his big wrinkled face like a carving stone."
As it happens, Ayers' signature rhetorical flourish, likely cribbed from Joseph Conrad, is the triple parallel without a joining conjunction. There are scores of such examples throughout Fugitive Days, perhaps hundreds:
"He inhabited an anarchic solitude-disconnected, smart,obsessive."
"We swarmed over and around that car, smashing windows, slashing tires, trashing lights and fenders-it seemed the only conceivable thing to do."
"...trees are shattered, doors ripped from their hinges, shorelines rearranged."
More intriguing still, Obama seems to borrow the one girlfriend in the oddly sexless Dreams from Ayers' experience. "There was a woman in New York that I loved," he tells his half-sister years after the fact. "She was white. She had dark hair, and specks of green in her eyes."
The woman of Obama's memory evokes images of Diana Oughton. As her FBI files attest, Oughton had brown hair and green eyes. The two women shared similar family backgrounds as well. In fact, they seemed to have grown up on the very same estate.
"The house was very old, her grandfather's house," Obama writes of his girlfriend's country home. "He had inherited it from his grandfather." According to a Time Magazine article written soon after her death, Oughton "brought Bill Ayers and other radicals" to the family homestead in Dwight, Illinois. The main house on the Oughton estate, a 20-room Victorian mansion, was built by Oughton's father's grandfather.
The carriage house, in which Oughton lived as a child, now serves as a public library. It may have already seemed like one when Ayers visited, an impression that finds its way into Obama's memory of a library "filled with old books and pictures of the famous people [the grandfather] had known-presidents, diplomats, industrialists."
"It was autumn, beautiful, with woods all around us," Obama writes of his visit to his girlfriend's country home, "and we paddled a canoe across this round, icy lake full of small gold leaves that collected along the shore." As can be seen from aerial photos even today, the Oughton estate also has a small lake and is surrounded by woods.
Curiously, Obama tells the story of this past love while cutting "two green peppers." In his 1997 book, A Kind And Just Parent, Ayers specifically links "green peppers" with "saltpeter" and other substances that scare young men with the threat of impotence. Go figure.
Ayers lived a considerably more adventurous life than Obama, beginning with his youthful days as a merchant seaman in the North Atlantic. "I realized that no one else could ever know this singular experience," Ayers writes. Yet much of the nautical language that flows through Fugitive Days flows through Obama's earth-bound memoir.
Although there are only the briefest of literal sea experiences in Dreams, the following words appear in both Dreams and in Ayers' work: fog, mist, ships, seas, boats, oceans, calms, captains, charts, first mates, storms, streams, wind, waves, anchors, barges, horizons, ports, panoramas, moorings, tides, currents, and things howling, fluttering, knotted, ragged, tangled, and murky.
My own memoir on race, Sucker Punch, offers a useful control. It makes no reference at all, metaphorical or otherwise, to any of the above words save "current" and "tides." Yet I have spent a good chunk of every summer of my life at the ocean and many a day on a boat.
Ayers equates the flow of water with that of language. "The debates swam above and around and through us," he writes. "The confrontation in the [Student Union] flowed like a swollen river in to the teach-in, carrying me along the cascading waters from room to room, hall to hall, bouncing off boulders."
In Dreams, Obama makes the very same equation. "I heard all our voices begin to run together, the sound of three generations tumbling over each other like the currents of a slow-moving stream," he writes, "my questions like rocks roiling the water, the breaks in memory separating the currents, but always the voices returning to that single course, a single story."
For the one and only time in his career, Obama writes in the language of postmodernism, a language the academic Ayers has mastered. Ayers describes Fugitive Days as "a memory book," one that deliberately blurs facts and changes identities and makes no claims at history. In Dreams, Obama admits, some characters are composites. Some appear out of precise chronology. Names have been changed.
Ayers seems consumed with lies, lying and what he calls "our constructed reality." The Obama of Dreams says much the same and in much the same language. "But another part of me knew that what I was telling them was a lie," he writes, "something I'd constructed from the scraps of information I'd picked up from my mother."
That they both speak of "narratives," "traps," "contradictions," "intimacies," and "journeys" is not exceptional. That is standard postmodern patois. What is exceptional is their shared use of advanced postmodern slang -- the "fictions" into which they and others force their lives, the "grooves" into which they have fallen, the "poses" they assume, and even the "stitched together" nature of the lives they or their relatives lead.
More convincing still are those complex tropes in Dreams that appear, only slightly altered, in Ayers' books. In his 1993 book, To Teach, Ayers writes, "Education is for self-activating explorers of life, for those who would challenge fate, for doers and activists, for citizens." "Training," on the other hand, "is for slaves, for loyal subjects, for tractable employees, for willing consumers, for obedient soldiers."
In Dreams, these thoughts find colloquial expression in the person of "Frank," the real life poet, pornographer and Stalinist, Frank Marshall Davis. "Understand something, boy," Frank tells the college-bound Obama. "You're not going to college to get educated. You're going there to get trained." Both authors make the point that "training" strips the individual of his racial identity.
In To Teach, Ayers recounts the story of an ambitious teacher who takes her students out to the streets of New York to learn about its culture and history. These students ask to see the nearby Hudson River. When they get to the river's edge, one student says, " Look, the river is flowing up." A second student says, "No, it has to flow south-down." Upon further research, the teacher discovers "that the Hudson River is a tidal river, that it flows both north and south, and they had visited the exact spot where the tide stops its northward push."
In Dreams, written two years later, Obama takes an unlikely detour to the exact spot on the parallel East River where the north-flowing tide meets the south-flowing river. There, improbably, a young black boy approaches this strange man and asks, "You know why sometimes the river runs that way and then sometimes it goes this way?" Obama tells the boy it "had to do with the tides."
For the literary left, the fact that Ayers helped Obama would be a less troubling revelation than that Obama needed help at all. They have built a foundational myth around his genius, a genius that can be located only in Dreams. The dark side of the Democrat genius mythology, of course, is the Republican dunce mythology of which Sarah Palin and George Bush are the most recent victims.
There is thus a logic to the left's willful blindness. Why the literary right has accepted this charade continues to baffle me.
Video: The Washington Times asks Ayers about his "collaboration" with Obama on "Dreams From My Father."
Jack Cashill has written six books this decade, one of which, "Hoodwinked," dealt with literary fraud. Cashill has also served as "literary doctor" on several other books, two of which were best sellers by household names. He has a Ph.D. in American studies from Purdue University.
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Again - you ignore the analysis and reality and attack the messenger. You have nothing left. Your messiah and emporer has been shown wth no clothes.
And my interest in this is based on the book by Cashill as well as the fact that Ayeres mentioned this again.
STRAW - NO COLLEGE TRANSCRIPTS, NO LAST, NO LAW REVEW ARTICLE, NO SCHOLARLY ARTICLES, NO JOURNAL ENTRIES, NO HIGH SCHOOL ARTICLES, NO COLLEGE THESIS, NOTHING AT ALL.
Yet - somehow you still believe Obama wrote this book and is otherwise a top notch author. got it. ::) ::)
LoL @ "analysis"
clearly Obama doesn't even exist at all and is obviously just a hologram/mass hypnotism by Communist China
seriously man - why don't you take Ayers up on his offer to help prove that he wrote the book. He already offered to share the royalties with the dipshit in your video (and I guess you missed the audlence laughing at that comment)
dude - this could be your big breakthough case and think about it for a minute. You'd be making money while also discrediting Obama.
How can you pass that up man?
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I just read through that and honestly, it's weak at best. He uses specific words as evidence i.e. Obama said ship twice and Ayres 4 times, ergo Aryes wrote it. He had more of a case when he talked about the advance and lack of a book for a few years. He tends to come off as more of a kook looking for something that isn't there but finding any connection, word count, words used and so forth. I would imagine there are countless books with the exact same word count and usage of aquatic references. Often times you can make a case for anything if your evidence level is so low. Plus he writes for one of the major birther sites. He's not exactly without an agenda here.
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I just read through that and honestly, it's weak at best. He uses specific words as evidence i.e. Obama said ship twice and Ayres 4 times, ergo Aryes wrote it. He had more of a case when he talked about the advance and lack of a book for a few years. He tends to come off as more of a kook looking for something that isn't there but finding any connection, word count, words used and so forth. I would imagine there are countless books with the exact same word count and usage of aquatic references. Often times you can make a case for anything if your evidence level is so low. Plus he writes for one of the major birther sites. He's not exactly without an agenda here.
You think 333 gives a shit.. if a crack headed psycho mental patient said obama had a tail... this prick would create a thread about it
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I just read through that and honestly, it's weak at best. He uses specific words as evidence i.e. Obama said ship twice and Ayres 4 times, ergo Aryes wrote it. He had more of a case when he talked about the advance and lack of a book for a few years. He tends to come off as more of a kook looking for something that isn't there but finding any connection, word count, words used and so forth. I would imagine there are countless books with the exact same word count and usage of aquatic references. Often times you can make a case for anything if your evidence level is so low. Plus he writes for one of the major birther sites. He's not exactly without an agenda here.
333 has posted this crap many times before
I'm honestly amazed this guy is a lawyer considering how he's constantly making unsubstantiated claims and when pushed for evidence offers nothing but hearsay, conjecture, etc...
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LoL @ "analysis"
clearly Obama doesn't even exist at all and is obviously just a hologram/mass hypnotism by Communist China
seriously man - why don't you take Ayers up on his offer to help prove that he wrote the book. He already offered to share the royalties with the dipshit in your video (and I guess you missed the audlence laughing at that comment)
dude - this could be your big breakthough case and think about it for a minute. You'd be making money while also discrediting Obama.
How can you pass that up man?
So again - you ignore everything else. Got it. Cashill is lying, ayeres is lying, Anderson is ying, etc. Its only obama telling the truth.
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Obama drones trying to boost each other up with e-high fives while 333 destroys the Messianic-like image they hold of their God-King. Haha.
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Again - how does someone go from literally writing nothing in their entire life, no record, no SAT, LSAT, nothing - and then out of nowhere write two books?
It defies all common sense and logic on all levels.
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So again - you ignore everything else. Got it. Cashill is lying, ayeres is lying, Anderson is ying, etc. Its only obama telling the truth.
It's got nothing to do with lying
he offers no proof
more importantly, why are you passing up the opportunity of a lifetime
you can make money (maybe you can finally move out of the ghetto), discredit Obama and become a GetBig hero.
Take Ayers up on his offer to help prove he wrote the book
Should be easy for you
You've already proved it here (right) so all you have to do is cut and paste and then cash your check
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It's got nothing to do with lying
he offers no proof
more importantly, why are you passing up the opportunity of a lifetime
you can make money (maybe you can finally move out of the ghetto), discredit Obama and become a GetBig hero.
Take Ayers up on his offer to help prove he wrote the book
Should be easy for you
You've already proved it here (right) so all you have to do is cut and paste and then cash your check
Its a theory, and there is plenty of circumstantial evidnce to support it. Between andersons' reporting, ayeres statements, the similiarity of the writing, thereality ofobama's inability to do this, it defies all common sense and logic that the messiah could write these two books.
Soory Straw - you are way too smitten with the false narrative you still buy in to to see the liklihood of all of this.
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Straw Man is an arrogant, elitist Bay-area liberal. They're not capable of thinking for themselves. Hell, tying their sneakers in the morning is a stretch for most of them.
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Question to morons like Straw, et. al-- Why is President Osama concealing all of his academic records, birth certificate, etc. and spending millions of his own money to do so?
If you can answer that question with even a scintilla of intellectual honesty and objectivity you will be forced to acknowledge that there is clearly something amiss with your Messiah's background.
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Its a theory, and there is plenty of circumstantial evidnce to support it. Between andersons' reporting, ayeres statements, the similiarity of the writing, thereality ofobama's inability to do this, it defies all common sense and logic that the messiah could write these two books.
Soory Straw - you are way too smitten with the false narrative you still buy in to to see the liklihood of all of this.
I'm not smitten with anything
you've proven nothing
what don't you understand about that
and again, if you believe it is true why don't you take Ayers up on his offer ?
contact him today and tell him you're ready to help prove he wrote the book
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Question to morons like Straw, et. al-- Why is President Osama concealing all of his academic records, birth certificate, etc. and spending millions of his own money to do so?
If you can answer that question with even a scintilla of intellectual honesty and objectivity you will be forced to acknowledge that there is clearly something amiss with your Messiah's background.
I don't know that he is spending millions to do so
maybe you can offer some proof
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Question to morons like Straw, et. al-- Why is President Osama concealing all of his academic records, birth certificate, etc. and spending millions of his own money to do so?
If you can answer that question with even a scintilla of intellectual honesty and objectivity you will be forced to acknowledge that there is clearly something amiss with your Messiah's background.
The academic records is plainly obvious:
1. Obama got into Columbia and Harvard via affirmatve action and/or special assitance from Khalid Al Mansour as wel as others who pushed barry through.
2. His SAT & LSAT will show even with affirmative action hewas not qualified for those schools.
3. His writings, if they exist, are sub par or radical marxian nonsense, or both.
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The academic records is plainly obvious:
1. Obama got into Columbia and Harvard via affirmatve action and/or special assitance from Khalid Al Mansour as wel as others who pushed barry through.
2. His SAT & LSAT will show even with affirmative action hewas not qualified for those schools.
3. His writings, if they exist, are sub par or radical marxian nonsense, or both.
so you now claim to know what the records which you haven't seen (and have seemed to suggest don't even exist) will show?
classic
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Straw Man is an arrogant, elitist Bay-area liberal. They're not capable of thinking for themselves. Hell, tying their sneakers in the morning is a stretch for most of them.
But this "guy" 3333 posts opinions of conservative bloggers as fact.. and on top of that when he is proven wrong he wont even retract
Swat team thing
200mil/day
his rates increased due to obamacare..
and more..
so thinking for himself isnt his strong suit either
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Again - how does someone go from literally writing nothing in their entire life, no record, no SAT, LSAT, nothing - and then out of nowhere write two books?
It defies all common sense and logic on all levels.
Perhaps he did have a ghost writer. Perhaps he actually wrote them. The claim of Ayres doing anything on the book is little more than a conspiracy theory at best. Nothing credible has been shown other than specific exerts likely chosen because of similarities that would prove his case. Like i said it's a weak connection at best.
It'd be more credible if he went after obama for having an unnamed ghost writer. But the Ayres connection is nothing more than a birther esque CT. Coming from a writer for a birther site, what else can you expect?
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ghost writers usually get paid
you'd think Ayers would have negotiated some part of the income from books sales for all his work
or at the very least a flat fee
seems kind of obvious
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Perhaps he did have a ghost writer. Perhaps he actually wrote them. The claim of Ayres doing anything on the book is little more than a conspiracy theory at best. Nothing credible has been shown other than specific exerts likely chosen because of similarities that would prove his case. Like i said it's a weak connection at best.
It'd be more credible if he went after obama for having an unnamed ghost writer. But the Ayres connection is nothing more than a birther esque CT. Coming from a writer for a birther site, what else can you expect?
Well that is the object of discussion in the video I posted and a good point overall. Ayeres helped Khlalid Rashidi, also a neighbor of obama and ayeres ghost write his book and rashidi thanked him for it.
I think the issue was that obama was under contract and probably could not admit to a ghost writer to the publisher.
Again - it defies all logic and common sense that obama did not havea ghost writer for this.
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ghost writers usually get paid
you'd think Ayers would have negotiated some part of the income from books sales for all his work
or at the very least a flat fee
seems kind of obvious
They worked together on the Annenburg Project and were friends. obama also got his political start in ayeres' living room. It could have been out of friendship to help his buddy out from getting sued by the publisher for a return of the advance money.
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They worked together on the Annenburg Project and were friends. obama also got his political start in ayeres' living room. It could have been out of friendship to help his buddy out from getting sued by the publisher for a return of the advance money.
or it could have been that Ayers didn't write the book and is getting a laugh every time one of you nut's asks him about it
as long as we're talking "could have beens" you have to consider that too
don't you think it's dumb to work for free and then later claim you want to get paid
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Well that is the object of discussion in the video I posted and a good point overall. Ayeres helped Khlalid Rashidi, also a neighbor of obama and ayeres ghost write his book and rashidi thanked him for it.
I think the issue was that obama was under contract and probably could not admit to a ghost writer to the publisher.
Again - it defies all logic and common sense that obama did not havea ghost writer for this.
But there is still nothing definitive to prove it incorrect. You don't see this is nothing more than a CT. I personally believe Obama likely had a ghost writer. I don't believe for a second it was Ayres. This is an issue taken by the right to discredit Obama and really he's done enough to discredit himself without resorting to nonsense CT's.
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or it could have been that Ayers didn't write the book and is getting a laugh every time one of you nut's asks him about it
as long as we're talking "could have beens" you have to consider that too
don't you think it's dumb to work for free and then later claim you want to get paid
LMFAO!
Yeah, because obama has shown such utter brilliance in his literary skills to produce dreams that no one should ever question the messiah. LLLMMMAAAOOO.
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LMFAO!
Yeah, because obama has shown such utter brilliance in his literary skills to produce dreams that no one should ever question the messiah. LLLMMMAAAOOO.
so other than your critique of his writing skills you've got no explanation why Ayers didn't want payment then but wants it now and when it comes to "could have beens" you can't see any possibly that Ayer's is getting a laugh every time you dopes toss him this softball and he tells you with straight face and on camera that he wrote the book and wants one of you idiots to help him get compensation
this is a huge opportunity
You're obviously a true believer so why don't you take Ayers up his offer
why would you pass up a chance to make some money, get famous (or at least notorious)
I
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People like ayeres are my mortal enemy. i would not represent them for anything and those leftist communist pukes stand for everything i am against. Personally, i wish ayeres were killed with his own bomb when he and his wife tried to blown up the pentagon.
Those are your peeps, not mine.
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People like ayeres are my mortal enemy. i would not represent them for anything and those leftist communist pukes stand for everything i am against. Personally, i wish ayeres were killed with his own bomb when he and his wife tried to blown up the pentagon.
Those are your peeps, not mine.
not my peep
I called him a POS two pages ago
still can't figure out why this guy would work for free and then later claim he wants money
also can't figure out why you can't acknowledge that Ayers "could have been" making statements just to fuck with schmucks like you when you have no probelm referring to "could have beens" for any other stupid claim that you want to belive
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Donald Trump: Bill Ayers Wrote Obama's Book
Newser ^ | March 31, 2011 | Kevin Spak
Donald Trump isn’t content with questioning Obama’s citizenship—now he’s questioning his authorial accomplishments, too. In an interview with Laura Ingraham yesterday, Trump espoused the theory that Bill Ayers wrote Obama’s memoir, Dreams of My Father, Aol News reports. Obama is only the president “because he wrote a book that is supposed to be a great genius book,” Trump said. “But now it’s coming out that Bill Ayers wrote it.”
Trump’s repeating a rumor that’s been circling in right-wing media. Ayers himself said that he had written the book at a speaking appearance last week, though as Allahpundit at the conservative blog Hot Air notes, it sounded a lot like he was being sarcastic. “Would you believe that I wrote it?” he said when asked about the book. “And if you can help me prove it, I’ll split the royalties.” At that the audience burst out laughing. Ayers has reportedly used the line, complete with the royalties punch line, in the past as well.
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Hope you are enjoying Deconstructing Obama. Here is what I thought of it:
In 1993, thirty-three-year-old Barak Obama stiffed Poseidon Press, then an imprint of Simon & Schuster—producing absolutely nothing for the publisher that in November 1990 had given the new graduate of Harvard Law School a $125,000 advance to write a book about race relations in America.
Eighteen years later, Simon & Schuster has achieved savory revenge (intended or not), by contracting with literary and intellectual sleuth Jack Cashill to impose on Obama a little of the transparency he so disingenuously promised during the campaign of 2008.
Given Obama’s approach to truth, the title of Cashill’s sometimes impertinent sounding imposition—Deconstructing Obama: The Life, Loves, and Letters of America’s First Postmodern President—suggests an appropriate methodology.
In this ever so readable and informative book, Cashill has taken great pains to corral probative evidence for two interesting matters: (1) the truth about who finally wrote Dreams From My Father, the essay-cum-memoir that Random House—for another advance of $40,000—eventually published; and (2) very reasonable questions about the paternity of the current president of the United States.
It had not occurred to Cashill in the autumn of 2008 to wonder who wrote Dreams, until a friend’s query about the political significance of some passages from the book led him to purchase a copy. As one who writes for a living, who teaches writing, who has been the book doctor to the publications of others and who is the author of a recent book, Hoodwinked, about literary and intellectual fraud, Cashill has antennae finely tuned to assess the writing quality of any text he reads. Of the thousand-plus portfolios of professional writers Cashill had read in his twenty-five-year career in advertising and publishing, “not a half dozen among them wrote as well as the author of” Dreams’ “best passages.”
Accusations denied by Obama in April 2008 that he and William Ayers had a significant relationship in the 1990s led Cashill to purchase Ayers’ terrorist memoir, Fugitive Days. The writing was excellent, he noticed, and a couple of passages reminded the curious sleuth of Obama’s Dreams. Unaware at the time of Ayers’ considerable literary output, Cashill wondered if perhaps the two Chicago residents—Ayers and Obama—had seen and patronized the same ghost. But then he acquired two published articles by Obama: one, “Breaking the War Mentality,” an essay from his senior year at Columbia (1983), and another, “Why Organize?” written five years later. Cashill provides several examples of unworthy sentences from the two Obama originals in which nouns and verbs do not even agree. The two essays make obvious that when Obama does his own writing it is on a par with his golf; and anyone who has seen the president’s swing on youtube knows he should drag his clubs to the Tidal Basin and drown them.
One of the early tells that for Cashill appeared to tie Ayers’ writing to Obama’s was the considerable and deft salting of nautical metaphors that seasoned the logs of Fugitive Days and Dreams, as if both authors had drunk the same grog. And then Cashill learned that right out of college Ayers had spent a pre-terrorism year in the Merchant Marine. What even the dullest readers of Dreams and Fugitive Days could stipulate to was that both the young Honolulu landlubber and the old Chicago salt yawed consistently to port.
Because it is a common practice for politicians to utilize ghosts for their speeches and books (Ted Sorensen wrote Jack Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage, Cashill reminds us), Obama’s employment of a literary shade would be of little consequence had he not claimed so publicly to having written both Dreams for My Father and Audacity of Hope himself and had his proxy penman not turned out to be former (and unrepentant) Weather Underground communist radical and bomber William Ayers.
Unaware of Ayers’ involvement, Time magazine’s Joe Klein (author of Primary Colors) called Dreams “the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician.” And British author Jonathan Raban named Obama “the best writer to occupy the White House since Lincoln.” As Cashill writes, while Obama was pursuing the Democrat party’s nomination, “the literati had already embraced Obama as one of their own.” The assumption that Obama had authored the books that appeared over his name snookered even the worldly-wise Christopher Buckley into voting for the man.
As the 2008 election neared, the mounting evidence made it increasingly clear that Obama had not authored his own memoir; and the Dreams account of the president’s childhood appeared less and less reliable. Cashill had not approached the Obama corpus as a bitter birther who suspected Obama was born outside the United States. It was the careful exploration of Dreams—especially the facts and timeline pertaining to his paternity—that eventually led the sleuth to doubt that Barak Obama Sr., the Kenyan graduate student after whom Ann Dunham’s son was named, could be his father. And the chances seem awfully slim that the three were ever together as a family. “If Obama was born on August 4, 1961 . . . Ann [Dunham Obama] was in Seattle two weeks later,” writes Cashill, registered at the University of Washington for two evening classes that began August 19, 1961—“Anthropology 100, ‘Introduction to the Study of Man,’ and Political Science 201, ‘Modern Government.’” That is just one of many problems with the story of Barry’s early childhood provided in Dreams and contradicted at so many points by the family and friends of Obama’s mother and putative father.
What adds to the pleasure of reading this very well written exposé is the manner of its presentation. Readers get to ride along with a masterful literary detective, watch him tag interesting items, and appreciate how he arranges them on the evidence table. To many readers, the initial clues that caught Cashill’s attention may seem picayune or indicative of little or nothing. But as the evidence accumulates, it becomes obvious that it is the author’s perfect pitch that enabled him to recognize the ruse.
Deconstructing Obama contains a lot of facts related to Obama that his acolytes have never found interesting. Just a few from the highlight reel:
• Dreams does not contain a single sentence about campus life during the five years combined Obama spent at Columbia and Harvard—nearly 17 percent of his life when the book was first proposed.
• Readers cannot learn from Dreams that as a twenty-year-old Obama took a trip to Pakistan, why, or on whose dime.
• Obama dropped the agent that acquired for him two advances (totaling $165,000) for the myth-making book, before his swearing in as senator in 2004 and the signing of a deal with Crown Books for a paperback version of Dreams and the production of Audacity of Hope.
• Since 2004, Obama’s two books have earned him royalties of around $8.3 million. (Imagine the piece of that action his original agent missed out on!)
• Obama appears to have learned nothing about literary ethics while serving as a research assistant to plagiarizing Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe.
• Obama has admitted rather privately but explicitly that he was “someone who has undoubtedly benefitted from affirmative action programs during my academic career.”
• Christopher Hitchens was not impressed with Michelle Obama’s Princeton thesis: “To describe [the thesis] as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be ‘read’ at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn’t written in any known language.”
Not only is Cashill’s hunt inherently riveting, but the detective’s sometimes cynical voice leads to impish, politically incorrect fun with language. Three examples: “Newsweek made Obama its cover boy under the heading ‘The Color Purple.’” “Obama’s fellow progressives, the party’s base, understand that the long march through the institutions will have many strategic stalls.” “As Obama would soon learn, the pastor [Jeremiah Wright] did not exactly cotton to a public spanking by a protégé.”
For this reviewer the most fascinating chapters in an engrossing book are the two—“Gramps” and “Frank”—that describe the radical, poet, and pornographer Frank Marshall Davis and his disturbingly close relationship to the pre-and post adolescent Barry Obama.
When Jack Cashill is finished deconstructing Barak Obama, we are left with a very different image than the one portrayed in Dreams and by the Obama presidential campaign. When our sleuth has put this puzzle together, the pieces accumulate to reveal an image—but it is not the one on the box cover.
Cashill’s book demonstrates that the president’s 2008 campaign was not about the audacity of hope; it was about the audacity of Obama. His dogged detective work also demonstrates that in no previous American presidential election has the press so abysmally failed to meet its professional obligation. In no national election of memory was the vote so singularly based on such a dearth of data about the candidate who won.
If the fourth estate looked anything like America, the preliminary findings Cashill attempted to share with the press in October 2008 would have established Ayers publicly as the ghost of Obama’s Dreams, and Sarah Palin most likely would be the first female vice president of the United States. Had the press done its own digging and reporting much earlier in the campaign of 2007-2008 for the Democrat Party nomination, Hillary Clinton would be the first pants-suited president of the United States. Michelle Obama’s assertions about Ayers’ work on Dreams puts a cap on the independent evidence that Obama lied about being the author of his memoir, and that he had another cock-crowing moment when he said Bill Ayers was just “a guy who lives in my neighborhood.” Beyond working with Obama on Dreams, Obama’s first political campaign was launched in 1995 at the home of William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn; and Ayers’ maneuvering of Obama onto the $50 million Chicago Annenberg Challenge that same year indicates unavoidably that during the middle years of the Clinton presidency the two were thick as thieves.
Cashill’s demonstration that misrepresentations unexamined by the press lead to fraud-based outcomes is the most disturbing part of the story. For a democratic republic, nothing is so sacrosanct as the right to vote; and that is why women’s suffrage through the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1920 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were (and remain) such emotional and precious victories. When enabled by a complacent, cowardly or complicit press, an audacious political hustler can disenfranchise the voters of an entire nation. The integrity of “by the people” is desecrated and voided no less by a candidate who succeeds in totally misrepresenting himself and his policies to voters than by the wholesale stuffing of ballot boxes.
Most unfortunately, the deconstruction of congenial myths is often received with the same enthusiasm as a stool specimen in the baptistery. While Jesus of the gospels said that the truth will set you free, one of his most poetically ardent defenders recognized that “nations grown corrupt” would rather “bondage with ease than strenuous liberty.” This fact is made obvious by the struthious apologetics that day by day through the popular media continue to anchor the myths of Dreams and Audacity.
Somehow the damning facts exposed in Deconstructing Obama must saturate the electorate before the 2012 elections, so that those who voted for the Barry of Dreams or the Barak of Audacity can see that what they voted for in 2008 was a cunningly devised fable
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/2697829/posts?page=22
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Great video - watch this.
Please please please someone try to dispute this.
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/298382-1
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BUMP
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Great video - watch this.
Please please please someone try to dispute this.
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/298382-1
BUMP
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333 - other than you no one cares
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333 - other than you no one cares
you would think he would get it, he posts a topic, it gets 40 hits and 39 are from him :D
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333 - other than you no one cares
::) ::)
Please Straw - day by day - the evidence like i said from Day 1 is coming out that the black messiah Obama is nothing but a thief, liar, a fraud, a con artist, a madoff, a hack, a shill, and an ignorant, illiterate, idiotic, and comical fraud you guilt ridden whites foisted on the public to assauge your guilt ridden souls.
Sorry moron - after watching that video - if you still believe obama wrote "Dreams" please call me - I have about a dozen business propositions for you to invest in.
His entire narrative is a bogus fraud, a fiction of guilt ridden white leftists and hacks like yourself, and now it is all coming out. You so badly wanted to buy into the story book fairy tale of the first clean, articulate, black candidate like obama that you put Hillary aside and made the rest of us suffer as a result.
Face it Straw Man - you bought into a bogus lie and a false narrative because you WANTED TO, not because it was based on anything real.
You libs and fools on the left who bought into the Faux-Obama story - did so based on nothing more than your overwhelmintg self loathing and liberal white guilt. Now we all have to deal with your stupidity and nonsense. It wont happen again in 2012 when you mental patients are taken out to pastue and tossed aside for a real candidate to hopefully clean up the mess of your placing a marxist/islamist/abortionist/communist anti-american traitor like obama int office in the first place.
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you would think he would get it, he posts a topic, it gets 40 hits and 39 are from him :D
God forbid I utterly destroy your 2nd grade level of worship of the mocha messiah and his faux narrative that yu idiots on the left put on the rest of us.
But keep buying in to fairy tales and lies about your false messiah you dope. every day we will expoe this communist/islamist fraud for what he is.
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run your bachmann and see where you are ;D
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September 24, 2009
Andersen Book Blows Ayers' Cover on 'Dreams' (updated)
Jack Cashill
In his new book, "Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage," Best-selling celebrity journalist, Christopher Andersen, has blown a huge hole in the Obama genius myth without intending to do so.
Relying on inside sources, quite possibly Michelle Obama herself, Andersen describes how Dreams came to be published -- just as I had envisioned it in my articles on the authorship of Dreams. With the deadline pressing, Michelle recommended that Barack seek advice from "his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers."
To flesh out his family history, Obama had taped interviews with various family members. Andersen writes, "These oral histories, along with a partial manuscript and a truckload of notes, were given to Ayers." Andersen quotes a Hyde Park neighbor, "Everyone knew they were friends and that they worked on various projects together. It was no secret. Why would it be? People liked them both."
Andersen continues, "In the end, Ayers's contribution to Barack's Dreams From My Father would be significant--so much so that the book's language, oddly specific references, literary devices, and themes would bear a jarring similarity to Ayers's own writing."
More to come!
Update: Ron Radosh takes up the case.
Finally, Christopher Andersen concludes: "In the end, Ayers's contribution to Barack's Dreams From My Father would be significant - so much so that the book's language, oddly specific references, literary devices, and themes would bear a jarring similarity to Ayers's own writing."
See also:
Who Wrote Dreams From My Father?
Evidence Mounts: Ayers Co-Wrote Obama's Dreams
The Odd Story of Romance in Dreams from my Father
The Improvised Odyssey of Barack Obama
Who Wrote Dreams and Why It Matters
Breakthrough on the Authorship of Obama's 'Dreams'
Who Wrote Audacity of Hope?
Obama, Ayers and the Knowledge 'Too Big' To Handle
Did Ayers Help Obama Get Into Harvard?
Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/09/andersen_book_blows_ayers_cove.html
at April 09, 2011 - 11:31:10 AM CDT
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God forbid I utterly destroy your 2nd grade level of worship of the mocha messiah and his faux narrative that yu idiots on the left put on the rest of us.
But keep buying in to fairy tales and lies about your false messiah you dope. every day we will expoe this communist/islamist fraud for what he is.
seriously man - the only thing you've destroyed is your sanity
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Andersen continues, "In the end, Ayers's contribution to Barack's Dreams From My Father would be significant--so much so that the book's language, oddly specific references, literary devices, and themes would bear a jarring similarity to Ayers's own writing."
________________________ ______________________-
BOOM!
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Andersen continues, "In the end, Ayers's contribution to Barack's Dreams From My Father would be significant--so much so that the book's language, oddly specific references, literary devices, and themes would bear a jarring similarity to Ayers's own writing."
________________________ _____________________-
BOOM!
333 - why are you wasting your time talking to yourself on this thread
Ayer's said he'll split the profits with anyone who could prove he wrote Obama's book so why don't you take up his offer?
Think about it - you already have "proof" so you don't' have to even do any work
I see a win-win-win for you here
win # 1 - you make money
win # 2 - you discredit Obama (of course people will have to give a shit about this non-issue but you can find a way to do that I'm sure)
win # 3 - after using Ayers you can turn on him and publicly call him a piece of shit (and since you would have proven he wrote Obama's book this will be a big story so millions of people will see this)
Of course, if all this talk is just the ravings of a pathetic idiot with a tenuous grip on reality then you'll just keep bumping your own thread, talking to yourself and taking imaginary victory laps
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Straw- wath the CSPAN vid I posted. there is not one shred of evidence bama was even capable of even writing Dreams in he first place.
Obama's entire bullshit narrative that guilt ridden panzie ass whites like yourself so slobberingly base their support for obama on is based on false nonsense like he alleged authoring these books which he did not!
His entire narrative and image is based on a fraud which you left wing liberal whites WANT TO BELIEVE IN, nothing based on reality.
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Straw- wath the CSPAN vid I posted. there is not one shred of evidence bama was even capable of even writing Dreams in he first place.
Obama's entire bullshit narrative that guilt ridden panzie ass whites like yourself so slobberingly base their support for obama on is based on false nonsense like he alleged authoring these books which he did not!
His entire narrative and image is based on a fraud which you left wing liberal whites WANT TO BELIEVE IN, nothing based on reality.
so I guess you've decided to forgo an easy payday, the opportunity to be a teabagger hero, etc.. to keep jabbering (mostly to yourself) on GB.com
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so I guess you've decided to forgo an easy payday, the opportunity to be a teabagger hero, etc.. to keep jabbering (mostly to yourself) on GB.com
Blood money. I would never ever do that. BTW - is anderson lying?
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Blood money. I would never ever do that. BTW - is anderson lying?
lame excuse (or proof that my other conclusion is reality)
you can totally discredit Obama, humiliate Ayers and if you don't want the money then you can donate the money to Palin or Bachmann
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Tuesday, October 06, 2009
Bill Ayers No Dream
There I was, sitting in Reagan National Monday morning, sipping a Starbucks by the United counter before going through security. I had a little time, so I was browsing through the news. Some military guys had borrowed a chair from my table. I looked up from time to time to enjoy the sun streaming through. That's when I saw Bill Ayers, an instant blight. Scruffy, thinning beard, dippy earring, and the wirerims, heading to order. I gathered my things, got my camera ready, and snapped a shot right when he got his coffee.
I asked--what are you doing in D.C. Mr. Ayers?
For a moment I thought he might be on my flight back to Chicago. Charming. Initially I guess he thought I was laying claim to his coffee or something. He gave me an uneasy cheesy smile when he realized I was taking his picture. I asked him if he was speaking at GW? (Only I said GFW, guess I had the VFW on my mind) He said oh you mean GW, he said no...was trying to decide if I was a fan, then said he was giving a lecture in Arlington to a Renaissance group on education--that's what I do, education--you shouldn't believe everything you hear about me, you know nothing about me. I said, I know plenty--I'm from Chicago, a conservative blogger, and I'll post this. (Oh, yeah, Bill Ayers, quite the Renaissance man, nail-bomber extraordinaire. Gee, I see another friend of Barack, U.S. Sec. of Education Arne Duncan was there too. "The conference theme is “A Time for Reflection, Celebration and Rebirth.” How touching. At best, useless, at worst, so wrong.)
Then, unprompted he said--I wrote Dreams From My Father. I said, oh, so you admit it. He said--Michelle asked me to. I looked at him. He seemed eager. He's about my height, short. He went on to say--and if you can prove it, we can split the royalties. So I said, stop pulling my leg. Horrible thought. But he came again--I really wrote it, the wording was similar. I said I believe you probably heavily edited it. He said--I wrote it. I said--why would I believe you, you're a liar.
He had no answer to that. Just looked at me. Then he turned and walked off, and said again his bit about my proving it and splitting the proceeds.
But the question remains--is Barack Obama a fraud? Is his myth-making creation and only major accomplishment a product of Bill Ayers' imagination? (or his own) Is our President Barack Obama's biography written by an unrepentant domestic terrorist?
Perhaps I'll become Bill Ayers' favorite conservative blogger and he can prove his authorship himself--turn over your notes Bill. And how about turning yourself in for your crimes.
I remember that era, Mr. Ayers. People died because of your actions, including your girlfriend. More would have if you had been more successful. And yet you have the gall to teach the teachers of our young. I won't forget your murderous intent, your shameful acts, your contemptible lies and evasions. And when history is written, I hope you'll be reviled--or forgotten.
As for our President, the verdict is still out. But Barack Obama called Bill Ayers friend and colleague for years. That in itself makes a damning statement.
UPDATE: My friend John Ruberry, Marathon Pundit links with remarks. Chicago News Bench links as well. If I ever write a book (of my own), I will love Tom Mannis to do a blurb for the jacket.
UPDATE: Jack Cashill, who first fleshed out the theory that Ayers ghostwrote Obama's book, on the new unofficial bio of Barack and Michelle, at the end of September:
In his new book, "Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage," Best-selling celebrity journalist, Christopher Andersen, has blown a huge hole in the Obama genius myth without intending to do so.
Relying on inside sources, quite possibly Michelle Obama herself, Andersen describes how Dreams came to be published -- just as I had envisioned it in my articles on the authorship of Dreams. With the deadline pressing, Michelle recommended that Barack seek advice from "his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers."
Read it all. Cashill's site here. Professor Ron Radosh with comments as well. James Simpson, DC Independent Examiner on the media silence.
More: Chicago Daily Observer links, lead story.
UPDATE: Comments enabled. Getting some email from conservatives, and one frustrated liberal:
Just admitted it. Unprompted. Just like that. Said he completely authored the entire Obama bio.
Almost as if he knew exactly what your most burning question for him would be.
What a load of horseshit. It even reads like fiction. But that's really all it takes to convince wingnuts. A lil innuendo.
Given all the circular links to reference other posts within your own blog, it seems you have a particularly unhealthy obsession.
It's a smart move on your part to not accept comments and feedback. Conservatives never cease to amaze me in the depths they will stoop to deceive.
I'm so glad your movement is fractured beyond near term repair. Enjoy your misery in the wilderness.
Cody Kessler
My response:
I enabled comments. Forgot to do it when I updated my format.
It wasn't my burning question at all. But it was obviously his.
I would have liked to ask, did you still feel you didn't bomb enough. But we were near security. In an airport. In D.C.
UPDATE: Just so readers know, I have been tracking Ayers for some time. I have an MBA from the University of Chicago. I've lived in the Chicago area for 30 years, so I know the Hyde Park and Chicago radical leftie milieu. And I first noted the release of his flag-stomping photo from the Hillary blog back during the campaign. My earliest posts on Ayers: Barack's Bomber Buddy, Taking Stock of Barack: A Radical Primer, Obama Responds on Che Flag, Judging Barack Obama, Clout List: Rezko Realtor on Obama Sale, Ayers-Dohrn SDS Reunion Tapes, Whiner Ayers, Ayers' Murderous Intent, The Trouble with Ayers, Fascist Obama Campaign, Obama's Founding Brothers, Subversives for Obama, Obama Ayers Khalidi
http://backyardconservative.blogspot.com/2009/10/bill-ayers-no-dream.html
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lame excuse (or proof that my other conclusion is reality)
you can totally discredit Obama, humiliate Ayers and if you don't want the money then you can donate the money to Palin or Bachmann
Watch the Cashill video I posted. That is evidence enough for me. Between the sentence structure, the numerous references to seamanship that bama would never know about and ayeres would suince he was a merchant mariner, the fact that no other writing hve similar prose or language, the fact that obama's other books are pure shit, the fact that bama has NEVER published a damn thing before or after remotely comparable to this, that bama blew the advance was under threat from the publisher to get this done, Anderson wrote in his book bama did not write Dreams, etc.
Sorry Straw - just admit you were duped by a false narrative you WANTED to believe vs reality and all is cool.
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Watch the Cashill video I posted. That is evidence enough for me. Between the sentence structure, the numerous references to seamanship that bama would never know about and ayeres would suince he was a merchant mariner, the fact that no other writing hve similar prose or language, the fact that obama's other books are pure shit, the fact that bama has NEVER published a damn thing before or after remotely comparable to this, that bama blew the advance was under threat from the publisher to get this done, Anderson wrote in his book bama did not write Dreams, etc.
Sorry Straw - just admit you were duped by a false narrative you WANTED to believe vs reality and all is cool.
I watched the video Ayers making an obvious joke at an idiot on camera and like all jokes that one flew right over your head too
besides the obvious point that I couldn't give less of a shit who wrote Obama's book
why do you care so much about it to spend hours and hours of your life posting about it?
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I watched the video Ayers making an obvious joke at an idiot on camera and like all jokes that one flew right over your head too
besides the obvious point that I couldn's give less of a shit who wrote Obama's book
why do you care so much about it to spend hours and hours of your life posting about it?
Because the Ayeres thing is hug in my mond since that is what propelled him into office in the first place. Without "Dreams" he would nrever be where he is today.
Funny - Ayeres books all average 23 words per sentence, and Bama's "Dreams" averages . . . . . guess what . . . . .23 words per sentence!
His other books are rambling nonsense that never make such vivd seamanship and oceanic referneces. hhhmmm, wonder why?
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lol.... just to be clear - you had zero critisism for palin's two "books" - one was nothing but a bunch of rambling excuses at a 4th grade language level, and the other was a 'collection' of patriotic quotes from google?
oh jeebus.
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Because the Ayeres thing is hug in my mond since that is what propelled him into office in the first place. Without "Dreams" he would nrever be where he is today.
Funny - Ayeres books all average 23 words per sentence, and Bama's "Dreams" averages . . . . . guess what . . . . .23 words per sentence!
His other books are rambling nonsense that never make such vivd seamanship and oceanic referneces. hhhmmm, wonder why?
dude - you cannot be serious. Now you're counting the words in sentences
you've lost your f'ng mind
Obama was losing until McCain chose Palin and then went wacko and shut down his campaign. He gave the election to Obama and no one was thinking about a book when they voted for Obama
If you're so sure that Ayers wrote Obama's book and you think that actually matters then why not contact Trump and tell him you'll work on this for free and give any money you make to his campaign. If anyone will believe that crap (and think it's relevent) it will be Trump
Come on man - you'll be the most famous GetBigger and you'll prove once and for all that you not a stark raving lunatic
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lol.... just to be clear - you had zero critisism for palin's two "books" - one was nothing but a bunch of rambling excuses at a 4th grade language level, and the other was a 'collection' of patriotic quotes from google?
oh jeebus.
She admitted to having a ghost writer.
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dude - you cannot be serious. Now you're counting the words in sentences
you've lost your f'ng mind
Obama was losing until McCain chose Palin and then went wacko and shut down his campaign. He gave the election to Obama and no one was thinking about a book when they voted for Obama
If you're so sure that Ayers wrote Obama's book and you think that actually matters then why not contact Trump and tell him you'll work on this for free and give any money you make to his campaign. If anyone will believe that crap (and think it's relevent) it will be Trump
Come on man - you'll be the most famous GetBigger and you'll prove once and for all that you not a stark raving lunatic
Watch the video.
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She admitted to having a ghost writer.
A ghostwriter is a professional writer who is paid to write books, articles, stories, reports, or other texts that are officially credited to another person.
Obama admits Ayers did a lot of writing in that book. You posted it above.
The only diff is, Palin says "I used a ghost writer" and obama says "Ayers helped me finish it".
Wow, THAT is what you're picking at? He says he was helped but doesn't use the exact word 'ghostwriter' that you seek?
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A ghostwriter is a professional writer who is paid to write books, articles, stories, reports, or other texts that are officially credited to another person.
Obama admits Ayers did a lot of writing in that book. You posted it above.
The only diff is, Palin says "I used a ghost writer" and obama says "Ayers helped me finish it".
Wow, THAT is what you're picking at? He says he was helped but doesn't use the exact word 'ghostwriter' that you seek?
he did?
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June 12, 2011
Why UK's Daily Mail Got Cold Feet on 'Dreams' Fraud
By Jack Cashill
http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/06/why_uks_daily_mail_got_cold_feet_on_dreams_fraud.html
More than three months after the release of my book Deconstructing Obama, I am still waiting for the first serious review in a print publication of consequence, mainstream or conservative.
The United Kingdom's Daily Mail -- more specifically its sister publication, The Mail on Sunday -- got very close to breaking the most consequential literary fraud of our time but got cold feet at the last minute for reasons that had almost nothing to do with my book.
I write this now not to chastise the Mail but to encourage its editors to pursue a story that remains as relevant as it did two months ago and to thank them for making good on the article they commissioned.
I will also explain what chilled their feet.
The Mail editors first contacted me at the end of March and asked me to write a 1500-word piece. They were helpful throughout and very encouraging. For those not familiar with the controversy, the first paragraph of my unpublished article, shaped with the Mail's editorial guidance, sums it up:
Did President Barack Obama write his best-selling, 1995 memoir Dreams from my Father? Or was this political masterpiece -- according to Time Magazine, the "best written-memoir ever produced by an American politician" -- actually penned by a ghostwriter, a former urban terrorist at that?
The Mail editors understood the potential political impact of what I was writing. "Obama's association with [Bill] Ayers, a man who made "unrepentant" a household word during the 2008 campaign, nearly derailed Obama's trip to the White House," I wrote. "A confirmation of this association today could undo Obama's ambitions for 2012."
There was much editorial back and forth. The editors helped me craft the piece around what they considered the most salient proofs in my book in light of the knowledge base of their audience. As I understood it, they intended to support my piece with editorial, likely of a pro-con style.
I wrote about Ayers's own only half-ironic admissions, Donald Trump's bold repetition of my thesis, as well as celebrity biographer Christopher Anderson's confirmation in his book, Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage. This 7-minute video synopsis sums up much of my argument.
After I submitted a 1500-word article, the editors asked for a thousand words more. This enabled me to explore at least briefly the textual similarities between Dreams and Ayers's writing that first caught my attention.
These include the 55 or so maritime allusions used by both Ayers and Obama; their shared "rage"; the matching Homeric structures of their respective memoirs; and their relentless postmodern talk of constructed realities, of narratives, of fictions, of interior struggles, of uncertain memories, of metaphorical journeys, of traps, of contradictions, of correctives, of rewritten personal histories. The pair also dabbled in advanced postmodern slang -- the "grooves" into which they have fallen, the "poses" they assume, and even the "stitched together" nature of their lives.
In their reading of my book, the Mail editors were struck by the focus on eyes and eyebrows both in Dreams and in Ayers's memoir Fugitive Days. Ayers, for instance, writes of "sparkling" eyes, "shining" eyes, "laughing" eyes, "twinkling" eyes, and people who are "wide-eyed" and "dark-eyed." As it happens, Obama also writes of "sparkling" eyes, "shining" eyes, "laughing" eyes, "twinkling" eyes, and uses the phrases "wide-eyed" and "dark-eyed."
Obama is the rare writer to fix on eyebrows -- heavy ones, bushy ones, wispy ones. There are seven references to "eyebrows" in Dreams. There are six references to eyebrows in Fugitive Days, an eyebrow-fixation that borders on fetish.
The editors asked me to explain computer-based literary forensics, and this I did too. As I noted, the most sophisticated study on this subject came from Chris Yavelow, a composer who has helped pioneer what he calls "computational corpus linguistics." His 27-page report compared Dreams with Fugitive Days on any number of variables: attributions, characters per word, syllables per word, sentence length, structure, flow, paragraph length, readability, verb use, modifiers, contractions, redundancies, clichés, and more.
Every variable Yavelow tested -- save, tellingly, for dialogue -- argued for shared authorship. On the subject of clichés, for instance, Yavelow noted that out of more than 3,000 clichés, the two memoirs used less than 7 percent and had 62 percent of them in common. "And, not only in common," Yavelow wrote, "but often in a nearly corresponding position on the distribution list."
Concluded Yavelow, "There is a strong possibility that the author of Fugitive Days ghost wrote Dreams From My Father using recordings of dialog (either tape recordings or notes). Alternatively, another scenario might be possible: Ayers might have served as a 'book doctor' for Obama and given extreme license to edit and rewrite."
I explained too that before Dreams was published, Obama had nothing in print save for two ungainly, amateurish articles. For the ten years after Dreams, he wrote only a pedestrian column in the neighborhood newspaper, the Hyde Park Herald. If he wrote a single inspired or imaginative sentence during those years, I was not able to find it.
In 2006, after receiving a lucrative advance, Obama produced The Audacity of Hope, a workmanlike book written in a style obviously different from Dreams. Knowing its genesis, a rebellious Ayers accurately, if a bit harshly, dismissed it as a "political hack book." It reads, in fact, like a strategic feint to the political center crafted with the presidency in mind and created by committee. No fewer than 24 people are listed in the acknowledgements section as having provided "invaluable suggestions" in its manufacture.
The New York Times' Michiko Kakutani had earlier observed that portions of Audacity sound like "outtakes from a stump speech," and she was righter than she knew. At least 38 passages from Obama speeches delivered in 2005 or 2006 appear virtually word for word as ordinary text in Audacity.
As I conceded to the Mail editors, however, shy of a serious confession by those involved, I would not be able to prove to the satisfaction of, say, Chris Matthews that Obama did not write Dreams or Audacity by himself.
Still, to credit Dreams to Obama alone, one must posit any number of near miraculous variables: he somehow found the time, learned nautical jargon, mastered postmodern jabberwocky, unleashed his heretofore hidden rage, and transformed himself from stumbling amateur to literary superstar without paper trail or even practice.
To credit Audacity to Obama alone, one has to posit several additional variables: after letting his talent lie fallow for a decade, he adopted a modified and less competent style and churned out nearly 50 pages a week despite his 12-hour days as a freshman senator. To suggest Ayers largely wrote Dreams takes no stretch of the imagination at all. To suggest Ayers wrote Audacity clearly insults him.
Up until April 27, the Mail editors thought the subject of Obama's counterfeit literary career worthy of a public airing. I suspect they still do. But it was on that date, after three years of playing an un-presidential game of hide-the-baloney, President Obama produced at least ersatz baloney, namely a birth certificate of uncertain legitimacy.
Although I had not written about the birth certificate, I got caught in the post-birth certificate cold front that swept out of Washington and chilled debate around the world.
For some very good reasons, editorial feet are beginning to thaw, at least a liitle. It is not too late for the Mail to stand up to the literary poseur in the White House, and God knows it is long past due for a conservative publication to do the same.
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Early Obama Letter Confirms Inability to Write
By Jack Cashill
On November 16, 1990, Barack Obama, then president of the Harvard Law Review, published a letter in the Harvard Law Record, an independent Harvard Law School newspaper, championing affirmative action.
Although a paragraph from this letter was excerpted in David Remnick's biography of Obama, The Bridge, I had not seen the letter in its entirety before this week. Not surprisingly, it confirms everything I know about Barack Obama, the writer and thinker.
Obama was prompted to write by an earlier letter from a Mr. Jim Chen that criticized Harvard Law Review's affirmative action policies. Specifically, Chen had argued that affirmative action stigmatized its presumed beneficiaries.
The response is classic Obama: patronizing, dishonest, syntactically muddled, and grammatically challenged. In the very first sentence Obama leads with his signature failing, one on full display in his earlier published work: his inability to make subject and predicate agree.
"Since the merits of the Law Review's selection policy has been the subject of commentary for the last three issues," wrote Obama, "I'd like to take the time to clarify exactly how our selection process works."
If Obama were as smart as a fifth-grader, he would know, of course, that "merits ... have." Were there such a thing as a literary Darwin Award, Obama could have won it on this on one sentence alone. He had vindicated Chen in his first ten words.
Although the letter is less than a thousand words long, Obama repeats the subject-predicate error at least two more times. In one sentence, he seemingly cannot make up his mind as to which verb option is correct so he tries both: "Approximately half of this first batch is chosen ... the other half are selected ... "
Another distinctive Obama flaw is to allow a string of words to float in space. Please note the unanchored phrase in italics at the end of this sentence:
"No editors on the Review will ever know whether any given editor was selected on the basis of grades, writing competition, or affirmative action, and no editors who were selected with affirmative action in mind."
Huh?
The next lengthy sentence highlights a few superficial style flaws and a much deeper flaw in Obama's political philosophy.
I would therefore agree with the suggestion that in the future, our concern in this area is most appropriately directed at any employer who would even insinuate that someone with Mr. Chen's extraordinary record of academic success might be somehow unqualified for work in a corporate law firm, or that such success might be somehow undeserved.
Obama would finish his acclaimed memoir, Dreams from My Father, about four years later. Prior to Dreams, and for the nine years following, everything Obama wrote was, like the above sentence, an uninspired assemblage of words with a nearly random application of commas and tenses.
Unaided, Obama tends to the awkward, passive, and verbose. The phrase "our concern in this area is most appropriately directed at any employer" would more profitably read, "we should focus on the employer." "Concern" is simply the wrong word.
Scarier than Obama's style, however, is his thinking. A neophyte race-hustler after his three years in Chicago, Obama is keen to browbeat those who would "even insinuate" that affirmative action rewards the undeserving, results in inappropriate job placements, or stigmatizes its presumed beneficiaries.
In the case of Michelle Obama, affirmative action did all three. The partners at Sidley Austin learned this the hard way. In 1988, they hired her out of Harvard Law under the impression that the degree meant something. It did not. By 1991, Michelle was working in the public sector as an assistant to the mayor. By 1993, she had given up her law license.
Had the partners investigated Michelle's background, they would have foreseen the disaster to come. Sympathetic biographer Liza Mundy writes, "Michelle frequently deplores the modern reliance on test scores, describing herself as a person who did not test well."
She did not write well, either. Mundy charitably describes her senior thesis at Princeton as "dense and turgid." The less charitable Christopher Hitchens observes, "To describe [the thesis] as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be 'read' at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn't written in any known language."
Michelle had to have been as anxious at Harvard Law as Bart Simpson was at Genius School. Almost assuredly, the gap between her writing and that of her highly talented colleagues marked her as an affirmative action admission, and the profs finessed her through.
In a similar vein, Barack Obama was named an editor of the Harvard Law Review. Although his description of the Law Review's selection process defies easy comprehension, apparently, after the best candidates are chosen, there remains "a pool of qualified candidates whose grades or writing competition scores do not significantly differ." These sound like the kids at Lake Woebegone, all above average. Out of this pool, Obama continues, "the Selection Committee may take race or physical handicap into account."
To his credit, Obama concedes that he "may have benefited from the Law Review's affirmative action policy." This did not strike him as unusual as he "undoubtedly benefited from affirmative action programs during my academic career."
On the basis of his being elected president of Law Review -- a popularity contest -- Obama was awarded a six-figure contract to write a book. To this point, he had not shown a hint of promise as a writer, but Simon & Schuster, like Sidley Austin, took the Harvard credential seriously. It should not have. For three years Obama floundered as badly as Michelle had at Sidley Austin. Simon & Schuster finally pulled the contract.
Then Obama found his muse -- right in the neighborhood, as it turns out! And promptly, without further ado, the awkward, passive, ungrammatical Obama, a man who had not written one inspired sentence in his whole life, published what Time Magazine called "the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician."
To question the nature of that production, I have learned, is to risk the abuse promised to Mr. Chen's theoretical employer. After all, who would challenge Obama's obvious talent -- or that of any affirmative action beneficiary -- but those blinded by what Obama calls "deep-rooted ignorance and bias"?
What else could it be?
http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/08/early_obama_letter_confirms_inability_to_write.html
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Booom! ! ! !
So much for the brilliant harvard lawyer and his grifter wife.
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http://www.wnd.com/files/FictionFixer-Obama-Ayers-3.pdf
damn - hard for the thugs to dispute this.
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Trust: We know ObamaCare was sold on a lie, but what about the Obama presidency itself? Rumors that Obama's violent leftist pal Bill Ayers ghostwrote the memoir that launched his political career may actually be true.
Obama has always claimed authorship of his bestselling "Dreams From My Father."
But Ayers is telling a different story. In promoting his new book, "Public Enemy," Ayers' publisher, Beacon Press, has written a blurb on Amazon.com that says Ayers "finally 'confesses' that he did write 'Dreams From My Father.'"
The boast appears in other promotions for the book as well. For instance, a Baltimore bookstore — Red Emma's — last week posted a similar claim that Ayers penned Obama's memoir as part of an announcement for a book-signing event at the leftist coffeehouse.
The reprehensible former terrorist twice before laid claim to Obama's book — once during a post-election interview and again during a speech two years ago.
In October 2009, Ayers told an interviewer at Reagan National Airport in Washington that he wrote "Dreams From My Father." Asked if he meant he "heavily edited" the book for his friend, Ayers insisted, "I wrote it."
He added that Michelle Obama asked him to help Obama, who had blown deadlines and was struggling with delivering a manuscript.
Then in March 2011, Ayers revealed his role in the book after giving a speech at Montclair State University in New Jersey. During a question-and-answer session, a member of the audience remarked how well Obama's first memoir was written.
Ayers agreed and offered that Obama's second autobiography — "Audacity of Hope" — paled in comparison. He said "the second one was more of a political hack book, but the first book's quite good."
Then Ayers volunteered, "Did you know I wrote it?"
"What's that?" the startled questioner asked.
"I wrote 'Dreams From My Father,'" Ayers asserted.
Obama's media protectors wrote those statements off as "sarcasm." But now Ayers is publishing the claim.
It's not as far-fetched as it sounds.
Ayers befriended Obama and his new wife well before Random House published his book in June 1995.
Ayers and Obama worked together on a panel approving grants for far-left causes. Later that year, Ayers and his radical wife launched Obama's political career during a fundraiser at their Hyde Park home.
If Ayers, who was an accomplished writer, aided Obama, it was a godsend.
Obama had a bad case of writer's block and couldn't produce. He had contracted to write his memoir almost five years earlier, when Simon & Schuster had given him a $125,000 contract after he was elected the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review. After Obama missed several deadlines, Simon & Schuster canceled the contract. Random House picked it up.
The writing style in "Dreams" differs markedly from "Audacity," which is comparatively dry and straightforward prose. The narrative in the first memoir has literary flourishes common to Ayers' own books.
What difference does it make now?
If someone else wrote the book the president has repeatedly claimed he did — a book that proved significant in his election and earned him millions in late royalties — it not only exposes him as a fraud, but further indicts the national media for failing to properly vet him.
In fact, the media elite used the book to help promote him for the presidency. Time magazine, for one, gushed that "Dreams From My Father" "may be the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician."
Others waxed proudly about how his tangled and biracial life story reflected "the diversity of America."
But this myth-making was recently busted by Obama biographer David Maraniss, who documented at least 38 instances in the president's life story that were fabricated. Obama made up people, events and history. Much of the book was pure fiction.
The real story may be that Obama was deeper in bed with an unrepentant America-hating militant socialist than he has admitted.
Did America elect a fiction to the White House? Are voters victims of an elaborate con? It's high time the national media started asking hard questions.
Read More At Investor's Business Daily: http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials-obama-care/112613-680812-bill-ayers-claims-authorship-of-obama-dreams-memoir.htm#ixzz2lrzBCNVe
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LOL - still flogging this nonsense
does your brain really crave something to obsess over that badly
didnt Ayers offer to share the profits with anyone who could prove he wrote Obama's book
why don't you and Jack Cashill team up on that
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LOL - still flogging this nonsense
does your brain really crave something to obsess over that badly
didnt Ayers offer to share the profits with anyone who could prove he wrote Obama's book
why don't you and Jack Cashill team up on that
Ayers admitted it 3 x now. Deal with it - your Kenyan fag drug addicted messiah is a complete fraud
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Ayers admitted it 3 x now. Deal with it - your Kenyan fag drug addicted messiah is a complete fraud
of course he did
why don't you take him up on his offer and cash in
you don't seem to have anything better to do and it seems like your investigation into how Ayers murdered Breitbart isn't going anywhere
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Bump ;D
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BUMP
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BUMP
BUMP
Bump ;D
BUMP
Damn this midget is melting down like crazy today. I bet mommy makes him wear a life vest when he is sitting at the computer so he doesn't drown in his own tears.