Oct 12th, 2008 at 4:37 pm
Quote of the Day
Jack Cashill at The American Thinker observes:
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.
Yes, that’s right, it’s an article whose thesis is that Bill Ayers is the real author of Dreams From My Father. I found it via an enthusiastic Andrew McCarthy whose recent posts at The Corner seem to have been designed to make K-Lo look like the picture of intellectual rigor.
Of course the speculations gets really interesting when we consider the possibility that Ayers was the assassin Hillary Clinton hired to kill Vince Foster.
61 Responses to “Quote of the Day”
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October 12th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
But still, Cashill won’t admit that Ayers wrote all of Francis Bacon’s works, who went on to write Shakespeare’s works, and no one seems to be explaining that.
October 12th, 2008 at 4:47 pm
There’s been a lot of hay already made about this. There was a particularly funny list of ghost writers at Obsidian Wings
For instance:
October 12th, 2008 at 4:47 pm
I love it! Putting aside the whole idiotic argument that Obama couldn’t have written his first book because there is no evidence that he knew how to write a book before writing his first one, of course Bill Ayers is the only person in Chicago (not to mention on the faculties of Columbia or Harvard) who could have possibly ghost-written Obama’s book. The wingnut mind is a scary, scary place.
If this is a preview of coming attractions for the next 4-8 years, I think I should stock up on the popcorn.
October 12th, 2008 at 4:48 pm
Please, don’t give them any ideas.
October 12th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
Not that any of is worth any serious consideration, but it dismays me that Dem commennators rarely point out just how mainstream Ayers is in Chicago, including being ‘associated’ with that radical lefty, Mayor Daley.
And also note the ‘race man’ McCain had running his campaign in SC in 2000.
But, of course, I’ve come to accept that when I hear the moniker, ‘Democratic strategist’, usually weak, unprepared commentary will follow.
October 12th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
Bill Ayers, not Henry Adams, is the real author of Democracy: An American Novel.
October 12th, 2008 at 4:52 pm
There has been insuffcient attention paid to Ayers’ role in bringing down Nixon. “All the President’s Men” is written in Ayers’ own inimitable style. Did Ayers blackmail Mark “Deep Throat” Felt into betraying his president? Felt, of course, was eventually tried and convicted for ordering break-ins at the homes of members of Ayers’ family, but pardoned by Ronald Reagan.
I mean, jeez, I just made that rumor up, and it’s more plausible than the tripe Andrew McCarthy is selling . . .
October 12th, 2008 at 4:54 pm
Everyone is missing the obvious– don’t you think that if there were pictures of Barack Obama and Bill Ayers together, they would be posted all over the wingnutosophere by now? That leaves us with only one possible conclusion– Barack Obama is Bill Ayers.
October 12th, 2008 at 4:59 pm
After a bummer speedball ingestion - Ayers, not Malcolm Lowry, penned “Under The Volcano” and Hemingway cribbed most of the material making up “A Farewell To Arms” from the burnt embers of Ayers’ unpublished memoir: “A Farewell To Semtex”.
October 12th, 2008 at 5:02 pm
No, Tyro, you’ve got it backwards. Bill Ayers is Barack Obama. Obama is a fiction, created (fake birth certificate and all) to trick the guilty white liberals yearning for hope into voting for the mysterious candidate with no track record. Come January 20, the mask gets ripped off and we all bow down before our new terrorist overlord.
Or something like that.
October 12th, 2008 at 5:05 pm
This is almost as funny as that time Chuck Norris went on Fox to blame the financial crisis on the Chinese.
October 12th, 2008 at 5:16 pm
If you think that’s cwazy, you should read this and this! I’m so glad that MattY does his part to help the MSM cover these things up! I just want to believe in change and hope, I don’t need any more news about even more items in the long line of disturbing links BHO has.
October 12th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
I bet if we asked Obama a “tough question” about how BillAyers ghostwrote his book or about how BillAyers and Obama are actually the same person, and put Obama’s response up on youtube, the results could be devastating for the ObamaCampaign!
October 12th, 2008 at 5:23 pm
When Obama gave that 20 min extemporaneous summary of Reinhold Niebuhr’s thought to David Brooks on a cell phone while walking off the Senate floor, it’s amazing that the other Senators failed to notice Ayers walking beside him and whispering in his ear.
October 12th, 2008 at 5:25 pm
Hey 24, you just posted two links, and neither are to your site! What’s up with that? Third rate troll AND second-rate blogwhore? Stick to your guns man!
October 12th, 2008 at 5:27 pm
The stylistic similarities between Obama’s 1995 autobiography and Ayers’ 2001 autobiography are much more simply explained by assuming that Ayers’ read his colleague’s memoir. After all, Obama was now in charge of handing out $100 million dollars in a project Ayers largely dreamed up, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, so it was natural for Ayers to want to know what made his colleague tick. And then Ayers was influenced by Obama’s memoir when he sat down to write his own. After all, in a 1998 book by Ayers, there’s a description of the celebrities who live in his neighborhood such as Louis Farrakhan, and Ayers points out “writer Barack Obama.”
Cashill’s claim that the nautical metaphors in Obama’s book must have come from Ayers, who was in the merchant marine, can more easily be explained by noting that on his Facebook page, Obama lists “Moby Dick” as one of his favorite books, a book with more than enough nautical detail.
October 12th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
Also, can someone please tell Yuval Levin that, when linking to a piece of writing, it’s generally customary to outline its central argument? “Obama’s health-care ad is a fraud– read my article where I explain why!!” It gives the impression that he’s playing a trick, wishing to lead us through an endless series of portals, hinting at a careful, considered argument that never quite emerges.
October 12th, 2008 at 5:30 pm
Yeah, Steve, but you fail to realize that Bill Ayers wrote Moby Dick too!
October 12th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
Sailer, did you think anyone here was seriously considering the notion that Obama’s biography was written by Bill Ayers?
October 12th, 2008 at 5:51 pm
it was not Ayres who was Vince Fosters assassin - it was Obama
October 12th, 2008 at 6:13 pm
I maintain that Obama’s books were actually written by Noam Chomsky. There’s no way a mere honky like Ayers could have been that clever at hiding his true identity.
Who’s for Palin/Huckabee in 2012?
October 12th, 2008 at 7:08 pm
The greatness of Google Book Search led me to this.
Money quote:
“The ….falls below the standards required of a forensic technique. It is clear that forensic scientists seeking a linguistic tool for the determination of authorship must turn their attention to other methods.”
Basically CUSUM enjoyed a brief heyday in the early 1990’s where it contributed to some courtroom successes, but it is now widely discredited as an accepted standard. (the book is from the commie-socialist hippie United Kingdom - not sure how CUSUM fits into American jurisprudence.)
So if you throw out the statistical basis for the argument, you’re left with alot of crap….they both used nautical metaphors? Oh really? Well Ayers, Obama, and about 99% of every other gd author in the world. That guy must have been three sheets to the wind when he wrote that bilge. American Thinker indeed.
I think this paragraph from Cashill was the most revealing:
So we have a perfect symbiotic setup for loony results. By including this quote, Cashill more or less admits he clearly WANTS there to be a statistical match to support his flimsy “they both used the word ‘wind’ in Chapter 6!!” idiocy. Gold has an incentive for there to be a match because it suddenly offers er… ‘credibility’ to this discredited methodology he’s spent ‘20 years’ working on/with. Gold (if he exists at all - I found zero Goodle hits on an ‘ed gold’ or ‘edward gold’ associated with the words QSum or cusum) knows he has a willing noise machine if he serves up the goods….I’m sure he’s picturing himself in the Fox News studios answering questions from Bill O’Reilly about his indisputable evidence….and round and round it goes.
And one final point - I love the jealous writer crap. ‘He got an advance, then didn’t even write the book! and then suddenly he did!’ - well, guess what jagoff…that’s how it works sometimes. Writing a book is a royal pain in the ass…sometimes things don’t work out like you planned.
October 12th, 2008 at 7:11 pm
oops…that is to say:
“The –CUSUM technique— falls below the standards required of a forensic technique. It is clear that forensic scientists seeking a linguistic tool for the determination of authorship must turn their attention to other methods.”
October 12th, 2008 at 7:18 pm
Well, we all know that we’re in uncharted territory–a black man running for president of a western country and actually leading in the polls against white man–so, there’s no telling what strange things we’re going to see coming out of the McCain campaign as they struggle to stay in the game.
A strange thing has happened- the tables have turned and the people who have traditionally been labeled as conspirators have turned into conspiracy theorists.
So, here’s my list of top 10 reasons why people who were going to vote for McCain anyway will not be voting for Obama.
1- Ayers wrote “Dreams of my Father”.
2- Ayers **is** Obama’s father (Publisher considered other titles including “My Dreams; The life and times of an American Terrorist” and “Papa was a Rolling Stone and a Terrorist”), ergo, Obama’s a (shock followed by organ)…terrorist.
3- Michelle’s a white woman in black face (cause we all know a black woman could never be that beautiful).
4- Kenya, the home country of Barack Obama’s black African father, is actually next door to Yemen which is next door to Saudi Arabia (pish tosh, world maps are nothing more than a product of the liberal media).
5- Barack Hussein Obama is actually a stolen identity. The real Barack Hussein Obama owns a popular bakery in Pakistan (pronounced all funny and stuff).
6- The “real” Barack Obama, real name unknown, was actually born in the Dominican Republic (which is also near Saudi Arabia) and before running for president was a popular salsa/merengue/reggaeton star known as DJ “somethin’ or other” in Arabic.
7- Anyone black or brown in the USA is an Arab American and basically a terrorist.
8- African Americans (aka Arab Americans) are for the most part illiterate and not capable of writing a biography on their own.
9- Hillary Clinton used to be a terrorist and now we just love her because she got screwed by that Arab.
10- Anyone who doesn’t vote for McCain/Palin is a terrorist (that goes for you Democrat-voting white people too).
October 12th, 2008 at 7:30 pm
By the end of the day, it will be discovered that William Ayers was responsible for the entire western literary canon.
This scandal has legs!
October 12th, 2008 at 7:47 pm
Capitulation
I give up. All these years that I’ve been working locally in politics, canvassing, getting out the vote, etc.; and all these years I’ve been propagandizing at blog sites for our side — all to help our side get some smidgen of parity with the seemingly invincible Republican ideological and political machine — and the best that their best and brightest can come up with in this extreme crisis for their movement is that, just as surely as Shakespeare’s plays were actually written by the Earl of Oxford, so Obama’s first book was really written by Ayers?
Words fail me. In fact, I will not write word one ever again trying to explain to people why the Republicans are wrong, I will not knock door one ever again to get out the vote against these folks. America, if these people have not refuted themselves more completely and forcefully than I ever could, if you take these idiots ever again as anything but the butt of cruel jokes, if you in any way need my help to see that they are idiots, you are hopelessly lost. I quit. I’m going to move to Iceland and take up short-selling whale oil futures, so help me God.
October 12th, 2008 at 7:53 pm
Oh, I forgot a critical one. We’ll call it number 11.
The number 11 reason that McCain voters (who where already going to vote for McCain) will not be voting for Obama…
11-Rev. Wright is also terrorist/real author of Roots.
October 12th, 2008 at 7:57 pm
No Republican pundit/writer etc think Ayers actually did it. It’s just more nasty “see what sticks” crap. No Republican who’d looked into Watergate believed it. Nobody but genuine crazies believed the Vince Foster stuff. We’re talking about very cynical people, these Republicans.
October 12th, 2008 at 8:23 pm
There are strong indications that Senator McCain has uncovered a link between Bill Ayers and Sacco & Vanzatti, who reportedly may have ‘paled around” with Bill Ayer’s 2nd grade schoolteacher’s gramdma’s car mechanic. Even more explosive than this, McCain’s team of sleuths have also discovered that Obama’s high school history teacher may have once read a book review on “Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist” by Alexander Berkman, who in 1892 shot and stabbed Henry Frick to avenge Frick’s actions in the Homestead steel strike. We all owe Senator McCain a debt of gratitude for protecting us all from these threats to the very existence of our country. Most normal people would not be able to ferret them out, but Senator McCain seems to be unique in his ability to find danger where others do not see it.
October 12th, 2008 at 8:25 pm
Yes, that’s right, our idiot racists have clearly demonstrated that Obama is not to be trusted - after all, he hangs out with Chicago’s 1997 “Citizen of the Year.”
Why is that supposed to make us afraid you nitwits?
October 12th, 2008 at 8:33 pm
I really appreciate the idea that because Obama is more articulate in writing then when he speaks extemporaneously he must be a fraud. Isn’t that the whole point of writing, that you get to think about what you’re saying and how you say it… that you get to refine your thoughts in a way that’s impossible to do in real time?
Good times
October 12th, 2008 at 9:01 pm
Art School Guy, damn you for bringing the most obvious and clear response to the question.
Sailer: “After all, Obama was now in charge of handing out $100 million dollars”.
Wow, what a powerful state senator! I wish that kind of leader were president.
October 12th, 2008 at 9:23 pm
We need to make sure to remind Andy McCarthy that, back in 2008, he was acting as a freaky “Obamatruther,” on the same level as those peddling “9/11-truther” conspiracy theories. Seriously, every time McCarthy says something, all replies to him need to start with, “this is the same guy who claimed that Ayers wrote ‘Dreams of My Father.’”
October 12th, 2008 at 10:37 pm
Oh my goodness, I’ve just read the Jack Cashill piece, and it must be among the daftest things ever put before a long-suffering humanity. Ayers said something happened when he was ten, but it was really when he was eight! Obama said he was ten, but he was really eleven! Coincidence? Not likely! They both use the word “murky”! Obama wrote a crappy poem when he was a teenager! Supposedly random 30-sentence sections of Obama’s and Ayers’s books average about 23 words per sentence, while Cashill’s own book has a 15-word average!! This is some pretty damning stuff.
October 12th, 2008 at 10:45 pm
It’s been clear for a few weeks that Lisa Schiffren is now ghostwriting the entire National Review.
October 12th, 2008 at 10:49 pm
speaking of daft, we now have steve sailer claiming that bill ayers “thought up” the annenberg challenge, which couldn’t possibly be a stupider, more unfounded claim.
the annenberg challenge was thought up by (drumroll please) walter annenberg, nixon’s ambassador to the court of st. james, a major long-term funder to the gop, husband of reagan’s chief of protocol, whose estate was where both nixon and the shah of iran went after their respective downfalls.
of course that was all a front for billy ayers. or something.
the endless stupidity of this is impressive, even for right-wing know-nothings.
October 12th, 2008 at 10:51 pm
Hilarious! This made my day. I honestly expected that Cashill would be able to find stronger similarities between Obama’s book and Ayers’s just based on random chance.
On the other hand, Obama uses “ballast” as a metaphor and Ayers worked on a ship once. Now that’s devastating.
October 12th, 2008 at 11:18 pm
I didn’t know that Chicago gave him their ManOfTheYear award. That’s surprising. I know that’s as hard to get as a star on the Hwd WalkOfFame. Except, that’s something that people basically just pay money for and then get. And, when an unrepentant terrorist gets a ManOfTheYear award, that says something about the city giving the award.
October 12th, 2008 at 11:57 pm
This is my favorite part:
Astonishing.
October 12th, 2008 at 11:59 pm
I think Republicans ought to make it their cause to try and have Chicago thrown out of the Union.
October 13th, 2008 at 12:02 am
Jack Cashill is a rightwing kook who lives in my city and specializes in tinfoil hat fare. That Andrew McCarthy bought this conspiracy nonsense tells you how desperate the repugs are.
October 13th, 2008 at 12:04 am
I’m still sticking by my theory that Obama is actually McCain’s long-rumored illegitimate Black lovechild.
October 13th, 2008 at 12:04 am
When an asshat can’t even be bothered to get the name of an award correctly - even when it has been explicitly named and a link provided, it demonstrates their commitment to excellence and demonstrates conclusively that they don’t give a fuck about the facts.
Did you have anything constructive to say Racist@wacko.moron.com?
Rhetorical question (obviously). Idiot@wacko.nutcase.supremebozo.com has never contributed anything to any board he has infested.
October 13th, 2008 at 9:59 am
Bill Ayers wrote my diary.
October 13th, 2008 at 10:41 am
it’s pretty obvious that the entire dialogue below was written by both Ayers and Obama in order to confuse their critics………
October 13th, 2008 at 10:54 am
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.
What a coincidence! There are thousands of politicians, and only a handful running for president! Obviously both Obama and McCain are frauds!
October 13th, 2008 at 10:55 am
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.
Obama was the first black president of Harvard? And he never mentions it? He’s so modest!
Seriously, how stupid is the Cashill guy?
October 13th, 2008 at 11:46 am
“Jack Cashill is a rightwing kook who lives in my city and specializes in tinfoil hat fare. That Andrew McCarthy bought this conspiracy nonsense tells you how desperate the repugs are.”
He is a nut and I wish the local PBS station would quit inviting him on as a panelist. I’m all for presenting conservative viewpoints, but we’re a conservative city - surely there is someone with a more rational, sane point of view than Jack. Having him on is like having a burnt out 60s era communist raving about how Bush orchestrated 9/11 to represent the left.
October 13th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
Hershel @34: “He wrote crappy poetry as a teenager!” My lord — I wrote Obama’s book!”
October 13th, 2008 at 3:54 pm
[oops -- close quote...]
October 13th, 2008 at 3:54 pm
[oops -- scratch quote...]
October 13th, 2008 at 3:59 pm
[grrr -- scratch quote...so glad thread's dead...]
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