Andersen Book Blows Ayers' Cover on 'Dreams' (updated)(MO suggested Ayers help?)

American Thinker ^ | 9-24-09 | Jack Cashill

[STARWISE]

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?

[STARWISE]

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."

September 20, 2009 Did Ayers Help Obama Get Into Harvard? - By Jack Cashill

Although terrorist emeritus Bill Ayers claims not to have met Barack Obama until the mid-1990s, there is reason to believe that he not only knew Obama much earlier, but that he helped get him into Harvard Law School.

The evidence, substantial if speculative, can be found in an unlikely source, Barack Obama's 2006 bestseller, Audacity of Hope, and it may have been provided by Ayers himself.

In the way of background, I have made the argument on these pages that Bill Ayers wrote the better part of Obama's acclaimed 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father.

From the beginning of my research, I had focused on Dreams because the myth of Obama's genius is built squarely upon this first book. So well crafted is Dreams that it inspired British author Jonathan Raban to annoint Obama "the best writer to occupy the White House since Lincoln," and his is the consensus opinion among the world's literati.

Audacity has not gotten the rave reviews Dreams has. The New York Times accurately describes it "as much more of a political document." The Times adds that "portions of the volume read like outtakes from a stump speech." With good cause. As I have shown previously, portions of Audacity are, in fact, word-for-word outtakes from stump speeches, most likely written by Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau.

Still, the Times reassures its readers that "enough of the narrative voice in [Audacity] is recognizably similar to the one in Dreams From My Father." With a major assist from a scholar who prefers to remain anonymous, whom I call "Mr. West," I have become increasingly convinced that Ayers wrote those stretches of Audacity that best capture Dreams' narrative voice, including the book's nicely written epilogue.

What attracted Mr. West to the epilogue was a series of parallel word choices as well as a positive reference to Benjamin Franklin, a figure whom Ayers also speaks of approvingly. After a close review of my own, I am convinced that the epilogue, especially its last thousand words, shows the hand of Ayers as clearly as any passage in Dreams. Intriguingly, too, Ayers may have written himself into its dialogue.

Although no one word or phrase reaches smoking gun status, I was able to match every distinctive phrase and concept from this thousand-word stretch of Audacity to a comparable one from Ayers' work-with one interesting exception. And for reference I was only using two of Ayers' books--his 2001 memoir Fugitive Days and a 2004 collection called Teaching the Personal and the Political: Essays on Hope and Justice. This extraordinary parallelism suggests a certain haste on Ayers' part as he seemed to be mining his own clichés.

Many of the words and phrases in the Audacity epilogue can be found in the Ayers' books, often multiple times. These include words like "contingent," "obscurity," "torrent," "inherently," "satisfying," glimpse," "fleeting," "demonstrable," "calculation," "petty," "nameless," "faceless," as well as "narrow" and "landscape" used metaphorically, and "labor" used as a verb.

Telling too are the phrases: "my heart," "filled with," "measure of," "sense of," "what matters," "the path to." Again, none of these is significant in itself. It is just that every phrase I searched in Audacity I found in Ayers, again often multiple times. This does not happen by chance.

The parallel concepts convinced me beyond doubt of Ayers' involvement. In the epilogue, the voice of Obama tells us that "satisfaction is not to be found in the glare of television cameras." Ayers is equally disdainful of "the sinister glare of celebrity."

Obama talks about our "collective dreams." Ayers uses the word "collective" the way others use "and" and "the." The Weather Underground was organized into "collectives." He refers to "collective well-being," "collective gloom," "collective goodwill" and a dozen other Marxist-spawned "collective" sentiments. Speaking of Marx, Obama uses the concept of "process" in a consciously dialectic sense as does Ayers.

In Audacity's epilogue, Obama tells the reader the he strives "to help people live their lives with some measure of dignity." Ayers too sees the need "to validate the dignity and worth of students," to honor "the full measure of their humanity," and to make efforts "to achieve and extend human dignity."

Obama talks of people "constructing lives for themselves and their children." Ayers speaks of "our constructed reality" and tells his readers that "the details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed" and that in his terrorist days, "we constructed our lives underground."

In the epilogue's most dramatic moment, Obama relates a conversation he had had nearly twenty years earlier with a friend of his, "an older man who had been active in the civil rights efforts in Chicago in the sixties." This friend was "one of the few academics" that Obama knew, and Obama listened closely to his advice about law school and a political career beyond.

"Both law and politics required compromise," the man tells him, adding that he himself had thought about going into politics but was unwilling to compromise. Historically, the real life Ayers has sounded much like Obama's academic sage. In Fugitive Days, for instance, he tells us that he and his comrades were eager to "combat the culture of compromise."

Looking back, Obama concedes that he was "perhaps more tolerant of compromise" than this older friend was. Curiously, "tolerant" is the one key word not found in either of Ayers' books in question. Apparently, he has no particular use for that concept.

The evidence to this point suggests that Ayers ghosted the epilogue of Audacity and that his worldview closely parallels the one attributed to Obama. But there is a corollary question that begs to be asked: just who is this "older man," the "academic" and veteran "civil rights." activist who wrote a recommendation to help Obama get into Harvard Law.

The epilogue identifies this friend as an urban studies professor at Northwestern University, but if there were such a professor, why not name him? What reason would there be to conceal his identity?

A more likely possibility, of course, is that the "older man" was Ayers himself. The conversation between Obama and the man is extensive and impressively well remembered. Since the older man is making points that Ayers himself has made over the years -- especially the need to resist "the culture of compromise"--Ayers would have had no problem recalling and writing such a passage.

The year of the conversation would have been 1988. Ayers and Obama were both in Chicago. Ayers, seventeen years Obama's senior, was indeed an "academic" with a newly minted doctorate of education from Columbia.

Although Ayers did not teach at Northwestern, his wife, Bernadine Dohrn, has, and Ayers himself presented a paper at Northwestern during the time of Audacity's composition. Ayers teaches in the Education Department at the University of Illinois, Chicago, but he has taught at least one course there under the rubric, "Education/Urban Studies."

If the world thinks of Ayers as a terrorist, he likes to think of himself as a civil rights activist. "Most of us had come to our understanding of the world from our involvement in the civil rights and peace movements," he writes in Fugitive Days. This is an identity he has aggressively staked, largely to establish the moral high ground in his endless squabbles with other, less seasoned left wing factions.

Ayers did not complete his doctorate at Columbia until 1987, but Dohrn apparently left New York and began work at the Chicago Law Firm of Sidley Austin in 1984. Ayers seems to have commuted between his wife and children in Chicago and his university in New York from 1984 to 1987. Obama left New York, where he too had attended Columbia University, and arrived in Chicago in 1985.

Steve Diamond, a life long member of the democratic left writing on his blog, Global Labor (now part of his new blog King Harvest) has documented that Ayers and Obama had a relationship dating back to their work together on a major 1988 educational reform project in Chicago. Diamond's source was "a senior Democratic Party activist who was part of the Obama campaign."

Although CEO of a major power company, Commonwealth Edison, Bill Ayers's father, Tom, apparently worked on this same project. Tom Ayers had been a major client of Sidley Austin, and it has been acknowledged by at least one senior partner that Ayers got Dohrn her job. Given her contempt conviction for refusing to cooperate in a terrorist investigation, Dohrn would have needed some extraordinary pull to get hired by a prestigious law firm. She could not be admitted to the bar.

A few years later, Sidley Austin hired Obama on as a summer intern. Did Tom Ayers grease those skids as well?

In the educational world, if not in the legal one, the radical past of Ayers and Dohrn made them rock stars. An endorsement from Ayers would have carried real weight at Harvard. If he did help Obama get in, it would have made perfect sense for Ayers to guide his protégé through, to get him the gig at Sidley Austin, to help him write Dreams, to secure him the chair of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (also confirmed by Diamond), and to launch his campaign for the Illinois State Senate with a fundraiser chez Ayers.

Ayers surely saw the potential. He was the wordsmith Cyrano to Obama's winsome Christian. Although a political person like Audacity's "older man," Ayers could never hope to woo fair America on his own.

Given Obama's oddly impolitic lurch to the left, David Horowitz has come to think of him as the "Manchurian Candidate." The usually prudent Horowitz wonders out loud who has been whispering in Obama's ear and for how long.

With his fingerprints on the 2006 Audacity of Hope, the 1995 Dreams From My Father, and quite possibly on the 1988 Harvard letter of recommendation, Professor Ayers has to be a suspect.

[STARWISE]

~~DING!

[penelopesire]

More Obama lies rising to the surface!

[ETL]

"It was at the Chicago home of [Bill] Ayers and [Bernardine] Dohrn that Obama, then an up-and-coming 'community organizer,' had his political coming out party in 1995. Not content with this rite of passage in Lefty World — where unrepentant terrorists are regarded as progressive luminaries, still working 'only to educate' — both Obamas tended to the relationship with the Ayers."
Article: The Company He Keeps:
Meet Obama’s circle: The same old America-hating Left
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YThjYTU1ZDBjNmQ2YzcwNzU1MmYwN2JiMWY0ZGI0NDA=&w=MA==
_____________________________________________________

"Dig It. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, they even shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach! Wild!"
-Weather Underground leader and wife of Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, referring to the Manson murders

Article: Allies in War -by David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com | Monday, September 17, 2001
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=63512670-BF7C-42A0-B41D-5D0FB9E09C09
_____________________________________________________

"Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at"
--Bill Ayers (1970), quoted in New York Times, September 11, 2001:

Article: "No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life With the Weathermen"
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F02E1DE1438F932A2575AC0A9679C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1
_____________________________________________________

The Center for Public Intellectuals & The University of Illinois-Chicago (UIC)
April 19th-20th, 2002, Conference
[Participants include: William/Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Sen Barack Obama]

April 19th-20th, 2002
Chicago Illini Union
828 S. Wolcott

This conference is part of the Center's mission of helping to create a more engaged civil society, working towards social change, fostering coalitions between theorists and activists, and combating anti-intellectualism in contemporary culture. It will be both a celebration of ideas and a rigorous examination of the roles and responsibilities that intellectuals play in society.

I. Why Do Ideas Matter? (a keynote panel)

We introduce the “meta” theme of the conference by hearing “success stories” from diverse voices discussing their experiences intervening intellectually.

Timuel Black, Chicago activist; Prof. Emeritus, City Colleges of Chicago
Lonnie Bunch, President, Chicago Historical Society
Bernardine Dohrn, Northwestern University Law School, Children and Family Justice Center
Gerald Graff, UIC, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences
Richard Rorty, Stanford University, Philosophy

III. Lunch and Public Encounters

Alternative breakout tours led by Chicago activists. Tours of Bronzeville and other communities, and visits to organizations that are working on partnering theorists with activists.

IV. Intellectuals in Times of Crisis
Experiences and applications of intellectual work in urgent situations.

William Ayers, UIC, College of Education; author of Fugitive Days
Douglass Cassel, Northwestern University, Center for International Human Rights
Cathy Cohen, University of Chicago, Political Science
Salim Muwakkil, Chicago Tribune; In These Times
Barack Obama, Illinois State Senator
Barbara Ransby, UIC, African-American Studies (moderator)

The Center for Public Intellectuals
University of Illinois-Chicago (UIC):
http://www.uic.edu/classes/las/las400/conferencealt.htm

[unspun]

Thanks, Star. Wanna digest this. Thought I'd slip this in, for a little listening, tonight (and calling, if you'd like!).

This Monday Night, 9/28/2009, 9-11pm ET...

What do Barack & Michelle Obama, Valerie Jarrett, Van Jones, David Axelrod, Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn, Carol Browner, Ron Bloom, Hilda Solis, Samantha Power and Rosa Brooks have in common?

TREVOR LOUDON bothers them a great deal -- because he blows their cover -- and he does it from New Zealand -- plus, he hears it all from a conch shell -- okay that last part is made up.

We will have two hours to compare notes. And, listen for other Obamologists calling in. Stream it live, or listen/call in at (646) 727-2652 ~ 9-11pm ET,,, 6-8pm PT.

Let me know if you'd like to be in an Investigating Obama & The Awakening ping list....

[mojitojoe]

Everything about obongo is fake. EVERYTHING! He is a pathological liar.

[mojito]

Well, well, well.

Another really big chicken comes home to roost.

We’ll see how long it takes before the NYT decides to cover the story.

[ETL]

REVOLUTION: Voice of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA [Maoist]
[Revolution] Interview with Bill Ayers, Revolution #63, October 1, 2006:
"On Progressive Education, Critical Thinking and the Cowardice of Some in Dangerous Times"
http://rwor.org/a/063/ayers-en.html
__________________________________________________________

From Investor's Business Daily (IBD), August 27, 2008:

"Ayers, now a tenured distinguished professor of education at UIC, works to educate teachers in socialist revolutionary ideology, urging that it be passed on to impressionable students.

One of Ayer's descriptions for a course called 'Improving Learning Environments' says prospective K-12 teachers need to 'be aware of the social and moral universe we inhabit and ... be a teacher capable of hope and struggle, outrage and action, teaching for social justice and liberation.

The Annenberg papers are quite extensive — 132 boxes containing 947 file folders with 70 linear feet of material. They undoubtedly contain more surprises regarding Obama's relationship with Ayers, one of many relationships Obama has sought to hide.'..."

Article: Annenberg Papers: Putting On Ayers?
http://www.ibdeditorial.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=304729375940845
__________________________________________________________

The RCP calls for the armed overthrow of the U.S. government...

From the website of the Revolutionary Communist Party (revcom.us or rwor.org) :

"Create Public Opinion, Seize Power: We are preparing minds and organizing forces for the time when there is a major crack in the system, whenever it comes and wherever it comes from: an opening that makes it possible to bring the future Revolutionary Army of the Proletariat (R.A.P.) into the field and wage a revolutionary armed struggle that actually has a chance of winning.

And we have said that building our party itself is the most important part of organizing forces for revolution. This is true now, and it is true looking forward to the creation of that future R.A.P. and the waging of that armed struggle.":

http://revcom.us/a/v20/1000-1009/1000/barw.htm
__________________________________________________________

"This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who's a professor of English..."
--B.H. Obama

YouTube Video:
The O'Reilly Factor confronts Bill Ayers:
October 24, 2008:
(note the red communist star on his shirt)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP3uvK9gTIY
__________________________________________________________

[The Comedian]

An endorsement from Ayers would have carried real weight at Harvard.

Yet another reason to close Harvard, burn it to the ground, salt the ground, and tell children scary stories about the horrors which used to roam its halls.

Frowning takes 68 muscles.
Smiling takes 6.
Pulling this trigger takes 2.
I'm lazy.

[STARWISE]

Thank you .. do you know what his expertise
is with this crew .. what he’s alleging ?

[unspun]

Loudon knows quite a lot about the Chicago Marxist nest.

[lilycicero]

Who is the “prophet freeper” that said this last year?

[ETL]

Did Bernardine Dohrn Mentor Michelle [Robinson] Obama at Chicago Law Firm?

"The media has been very gentle on Michelle Obama, but one blogger asks a very interesting question about Bernardine Dohrn's possible mentoring of Michelle at Sidley Austin in Chicago, where Dohrn worked as a paralegal [her felony conviction meant she couldn't pass the Illinois bar exam] while Michelle was an intern during summers while in law school. Michelle was later taken into the prestigious firm when she graduated from Harvard Law. Michelle in turn mentored Obama in '89 & they eventually married.

The MSM will never ask any questions about Dohrn & Michelle [Robinson] Obama intersecting at Sidley Austin. It would be nice if Republicans had more investigative reporters because my inquiring mind would like to know.

It might be that the Ayers-Dohrn relationship with the Obamas goes back earlier and the relationship could be much more extensive than previously reported."

http://oldatlanticlighthouse.wordpress.com/2008/04/22/was-bernardine-dohrn-the-mentor-of-michelle-obama-at-sidley-austin/

http://archive.redstate.com/blogs/daveinboca/2008/apr/25/did_bernardine_dohrn_mentor_michelle_robinson_obama_at_chicago_law_firm

[stylin19a]

I’m of the belief that Ayers and Obama go back further...(farther ?) to Columbia.

[ETL]

I’m of the belief that Ayers and Obama go back further...(farther?) to Columbia.

From the Columbia University website...

"Obama attended Columbia College from 1981 to 1983"
Source:
http://news.columbia.edu/home/1260
_________________________________________________

Bill Ayers' education:
1987 - Ed.D, Columbia University, Curriculum & Instruction
1987 - M.Ed, Teachers College, Columbia University, Early Childhood Education
1984 [he completed degree in '84] - M.Ed, Bank Street College, Early Childhood Education
1968 - B.A., University of Michigan, American Studies
http://education.uic.edu/directory/faculty_info.cfm?netid=bayers
_________________________________________________

Bank Street College
Where We Are and How to Get Here:

Bank Street College is located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan at 610 West 112th Street, between Broadway and Riverside Drive.

Bank Street College is located in a bustling family and university neighborhood four blocks from Columbia University
http://www.bankstreet.edu/aboutbsc/visiting.html
_________________________________________________

Why Won’t Obama Talk About Columbia?
The years he won’t discuss may explain the Ayers tie he keeps lying about:
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NjY4YzdhMDBkZGQ3ZmU2MTUzYjdkMzc5ZjUzYmViZWM=

[pointsal]

SO2 alert (Sulfur dioxide for the public school types in NYC.)

[BilLies]

This book will be on my local library shelves about six months after it is NOT reviewed by the NY Times.

If anyone wants to know of the lawfulness and charitably of the American people, all they have see is that Ayers and his terrorist wife Bernadine Dohrn are still alive and doing well. Wake me up when things change.

[Son House]

Bernadine Dohrn’s sister, Jennifer Dohrn was married to the lawyer for the Black Panthers and was a professor at Columbia at the same time that Obama was at Columbia.

[Son House]

Bernadine Dohrn, “holding my nose and going through with surrender”

Bernadine Dohrn “I remain committed to the struggle ahead”

Bernadine Dohrn “I am not committed to non-violence in any way”

From;

Extensive archival material, including, photographs, film footage and FBI documents are interwoven with modern-day interviews to trace the group’s path, from its pitched battles with police on Chicago’s streets, to its bombing of the U.S. Capitol, to its successful endeavor breaking acid-guru Timothy Leary out of prison.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6078589535743610981&ei=TcToSISuDYKM_QHws5n4Dw&q=Underground+bernadine+dohrn

Bernadine Dohrn “served on panels with Obama” referenced in article below;

Senator helped fund organization that rejects ‘racist’ Israel’s existence

http://www.chicagotribune.com/topic/sfl-barackbash1,0,4014780.story?page=1

http://www.chicagotribune.com/topic/sfl-barackbash1,0,4014780.story?page=2

[Son House]

From;

http://www.sodahead.com/question/155269/

Bernadine Dohrn made numerous contacts with Fidel Castro’s Cuban Mission at the UN in 1968 and 1969, during which time she arranged for SDS groups to visit Havana.

After returning from Cuba, Dohrn and others met with North Vietnamese and Viet Cong representatives in Budapest, Hungary, to discuss antiwar strategy on US campuses. Speaking a few days later at an assembly of revolutionary student movements at Columbia University, Dohrn reported that the Vietnamese communists she met in Budapest were working with US GIs in Saigon, attempting to obtain military information.

As a gesture of solidarity, the Vietnamese who Dohrn met in Budapest presented her with a ring made from an American aircraft shot down over North Vietnam. Bill Ayers would receive a similar ring while meeting with Vietnamese communists in Toronto. He later recalled being so moved by the gesture that he “left the room to cry.” He said, “I realized...America was an evil... and that I was... living inside the belly of the beast....”

In January 1969, at the request of the Cubans and the Vietnamese, Dohrn assembled another SDS delegation to travel to Havana to plan what the Chicago Sun-Times called an “antiwar campaign during an eight-day seminar with representatives of Hanoi and the Viet Cong.”

Dohrn became a key planner in the founding of the Venceremos Brigades. Ostensibly a “solidarity” program for US leftists to visit and support Castro’s Cuba, the group was actually organized by Cuban intelligence as a covert attack on US security.

Cuban secret police offered the “brigadistas” money, advice and logistical support. Some Americans were also given guerrilla warfare training and instructed in the use of weapons and explosives.

While they were in Cuba, Huynh Van Ba, a representative of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam (Viet Cong) advised his American allies to “look for the person who fights hardest against the cops.” Dohrn stayed in telephone contact with Ba after returning home.