Penetrating Insights into the Obvious
Posted on 10/13/2008 3:26:50 PM PDT by MichaelAsher54
The emergence of a previously unseen writing sample proves all but conclusively that Barack Obama did not in any meaningful way write Dreams From My Father, the book that Time Magazine has called “the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician.”
The emergence of a second writing sample, this one by a legitimate author, provides convincing evidence as to who did.
In 1990, the University of Illinois at Springfield published a collection of essays called After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois. Obama contributed a chapter, titled: “Why Organize? Problems and Promise in the Inner City.”
1990, by the way, was the year that Obama, the newly elected president of the Harvard Law Review, received a six-figure advance from Simon & Schuster to write what would become Dreams From My Father.
(Excerpt) Read more at cashill.com ...
Fake but true...
So, just because he didn’t write the book, we should vote for him? He can’t shirk blame that easily.
Great, now he can say “those aren’t the dreams I remember.”
Well if Ayers wrote the book, then he was a bit more than just a guy who lived in his neighborhood.
A great piece of detective work.
How does this Cashill piece see the light of day?
There’s no sin in having a ghost writer, but the intimacy goes past “a guy in my neighborhood.”
Doesn’t it?
Yeah, but Ayers was rehabilitated, doncha’ know. Everyone gets three cheers and a pat on the back after treatment. Besides, the missus’ maid presents such lovely tea and scones.
Cashill was interviewed by Michael Medved today.
I’ve suggested to Jack that he put together a video a.s.a.p. which he thought was a good idea.
Hope he does it pronto.
Despite my mistrust (Cashill has had some good stuff, but he tends to overinterpret his evidence in his other conspiracy tales), Cashill had me with him until I looked at his comparative quotations.
None of them even come close to offering strong evidence of borrowing or even real similarity, neither in content nor in style.
Yes, Obama’s 1990 essay was clunky, because that’s the way academics write. Someone helped him write his two books, but that doesn’t mean they were ghostwritten. Someone may have coached him in how to write in the style of his two books. It can be learned and taught. Obama is not stupid. He could very well have learned in 5 years time (if the U of Springfield essay was published in 1990, it had to have been written a year or more earlier) to write the way the two autobiographies are written. Or he may have both had some coaching and a strong editor.
On the other hand, it’s possible the books were ghostwritten. I won’t exclude that possibility, but Cashill hasn’t even come close to making his own case.
Cashill says that the question is not why Obama would have wanted Ayers to write the book for him, but why somebody as well established as Ayers would have wanted to write the book for an unknown nobody like Obama.
The answer is simply that Obama fulfilled Ayers’ fantasy. Ayers, like most of the white radicals of his time, really wanted to be black. The privileged white college kids had always longingly regarded violent underclass blacks as the most “authentic” radicals or revolutionaries and seriously romanticized them. The fact that Obama was not entirely black, not “African American” by any stretch of the imagination, and neither ghetto class nor violent, really didn’t matter to Ayers, because what Obama gave him was a coffee-colored tabula rasa. Obama, the center-less sociopath, had the color that Ayers wanted, and he was perfectly willing to let Ayers define the rest of his personality.
Ayers is Obama’s Pygmalion, a man who created him and then fell in love with his creation. Obama as we know him probably wouldn’t exist without Ayers.
“the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician.”
Good freaking grief. Ever heard of Grant’s Memoirs?
“Those aren’t the dreams I knew’!
What’s interesting about this entire vita of Obama is this . . .
It’s all (to quote a fabulous Elaine Benis line from Seinfeld): Fake, fake, fake, fake, fake.
The guy is a faked orgasm.
.
The second set of comparisons is not of writing style or syntax, but literary style and prose methodology in writing as taught by Prof. Ayers. Each “Obama” example is the utilization of that preceding riting technique or mode.
Cashill actually makes me believe him.
You know, reading, riting and rithmetic....
Obama can't write.
I listen to some experienced writers discussing this a month or more ago. He has no history of writing anything and no one starts out writing a masterpiece.
Listen to the guy, he is nothing special, he is a fake.
Great find, give it to Drudge and O’reily.
Good writing is one of the things that can’t be taught. And editors can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. And welcome to FR.
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