Posted on 10/11/2008 10:42:38 PM PDT by pissant
There has been speculation about this which I've ignored, no doubt because there are enough policy reasons to oppose Barack Obama and I don't want to feed into what sounds, at first blush, like Vince Fosteresque paranoia. But I've finally read Jack Cashill's lengthy analysis in The American Thinker. It is thorough, thoughtful, and alarming — particularly his deconstruction of the text in Obama's memoir and comparison to the themes, sophistication and signature phraseology of Bill Ayers' memoir.
There is nothing in Obama's scant paper trail prior to 1995 that would suggest something as stylish and penetrating as, at times, Dreams from My Father is. And when Obama speaks extemporaneously, one doesn't hear the same voice one encounters in the book. Now maybe Obama has a backlog of writing fom Columbia or Harvard that signal great literary promise, but he not only hasn't shared it, he's assiduously hidden traces of it. And, to be sure, writing is different from speaking — in fairness, some of Obama's off-the-cuff bumbling when he speaks is certainly due to the rigors of the campaign which would cause even the most gifted communicator to faulter from time to time. But it's not unreasonable to expect more similarity between Obama the writer and Obama the orator.
There's been some talk around here about Christopher Buckley's endorsement of Obama. I don't really know Christopher (I've met him once), but I've admired his writing over the years. And prowess with the written word plainly is important to him. Like the rest of us, Christopher can point to nothing noteworthy in Obama's record — to call it a thin record is an understatement — other than that Obama is clearly a man of the Left, which Christopher is not. But he gets beyond his misgivings because of what he takes to be Obama's intellect, for which he finds evidence principally in Obama's writing:
I’ve read Obama’s books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books. Imagine. He is also a lefty. I am not.... But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren’t going to get us out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves.... Obama has in him—I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy “We are the people we have been waiting for” silly rhetoric—the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader.
Now, as Jonah has pointed out, there's a lot to disagree with in that rationale. But I don't want to get into all that. My narrow point here is that we don't really know Obama. Taking Christopher Buckley as a measure of what intelligent people who favor Obama are thinking, it's fair to say there's a lot riding on Obama's writing. I'd like to feel more confident that he wrote it: If he wins, Obama will be my president, and as I'm not a MoveOn Democrat who'd rather tear down my country than see a president I opposed succeed, I'd like to feel some of Christopher's hope for what that portends.
Cashill raises significant questions about whether Obama is the rara avis he's portrayed to be.
It matters not to those on his side.
Charles Manson could have written it for all they care.
They worked on it together waiting in the car pickup line at their kids school...yeah that’s the ticket.
Hillary didn’t write “It Takes A Village” but that doesn’t matter to Democrats. It’s just the thought that counts.
Agreed. I suspect Bambi is refusing to release his Columbia senior thesis because it would demonstrate that he cant write to save his life.
Whether it was Ayers or not remains to be seen.
Now there is speculation that Ayers designed the Obama logo. It bears some resemblance to the Weather Underground logo and the artwork on Ayers and Dohrns new book.
Source? And make sure you're referencing the Weather Underground terrorist group, not the Weather Underground, um, weather website and their logo (below).
A genuine example of Big Ear’s wordsmithing:
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.
Gotta love those fig-tramplin’ chimpoids. That’s literature, folks!
Tumble in the
Rushing water,
Musty, wet pelts
Glistening in the blue.
Link is here, among other places:
http://blogs.discovery.com/news_animal/2008/05/barack-obama-wa.html
Over the years, Ayers has written quite a number of books, releasing them at a fairly rapid pace. Someone (I'll try to find the FR link) has analyzed his release dates and discovered two unusually long breaks in the timing of Ayers' book releases. One happened just before Obama's first book was released and the other just before his second one was. While it's clearly circumstantial, it could indicate that Ayers really was Obama's ghost writer.
John Kennedy had Ted Sorensen for a ghost writer.
No, see above post #7, the logo right before the Palestine one.
Btw, do you know the name of Ayers and Dorhns new book?
Thanks!
Here is some comparison I did!
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2103270/posts
You wrote: “I suspect Bambi is refusing to release his Columbia senior thesis because it would demonstrate that he cant write to save his life.”
Yes, that could be the reason.
Or... another reason might be that he doesn’t want the American public to see the content of it, because it might include politically damaging material.
Or... another reason might be that parts of it are plagiarized, and he knows that it would be scrutinized and the plagiarism would be caught.
Or.... ?
Found it at Texas Darlin' blog
Just scroll down the page a time or two to Another Coincidence?
While his writing in those examples is certainly well above that evinced in Michelle Obama's thesis, it doesn't resemble either of his published works.
Now one doesn't expect exams to be great literature, but it is a bit surprising that I cannot detect any strong similarity of word use or sentence styles. This could be a tribute to Mr. Obama, that he can be so successful in taking two completely different tones, one professorial and the other a more creative writer, but, frankly, based solely on the occasional misused word in the exams, I doubt that he has the ability to take on such strongly different styles.
Counterbalancing that, he does have the ability to put together cohesive sentences and create hypothetical situations that do flow well. We can all make the occasional word use error or flub a subject/verb agreement, and perhaps it isn't fair of me to read too much into the differences in a test and a literary endeavor based on what might be no more than a few typos.
what if Timothy McVeigh was McCain’s ghost writer.
You mean the question where he had Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem and their child was brain dead?
That was from one of his questions. That was written when Muslims were taking over Bethlehem.
Check it out.
Wonder if McCain praised Timothy McVeigh’s book on how to educate youngsters to become radicals themselves.
Obama did just that regarding Ayers’ book.
I believe that you are referring to the Fall 1997 exam. My point was that the style exhibited in the tests was not similar to his literary endeavors, and that the occasional error in the tests I thought was more of the hallmark of someone who probably isn't proficient enough to master two completely different auctorial voices.
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