overthebow
Laugh-a while-a you can-a
- Joined
- Jun 12, 2004
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Hating won't make you smarter, AJ.
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Herbert E. Meyer served during the Reagan Administration as Special Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence and Vice Chairman of the CIA's National Intelligence Council.Would you believe me if I told you that while in Milan last weekend, I'd been to La Scala for the world premiere of a new opera by George W. Bush? And would you ever again take me seriously if I published a review of Bush's new opera in which I wrote that "...through this work, so infused with the passion of Carmen, the musicality of La Boheme and the drama of Tosca, our forty-third president takes his place as the most gifted composer in the history of American politics"?
Of course not. No one, not even that former-Bush-White-House-press-secretary blonde who keeps showing up on Fox News, would believe this because it's utterly preposterous. A man who has displayed not the slightest musical talent simply cannot sit down one day and produce an operatic masterpiece.
And as Jack Cashill proves in Deconstructing Obama, it is just as preposterous to believe that President Obama actually wrote his lyrical, extravagantly praised autobiography, Dreams from My Father. On page after page, chapter after chapter, Cashill shows why it simply isn't possible for Obama to have produced such a high-quality autobiography. For instance, Obama wrote nearly nothing before Dreams from My Father, despite being president of the Harvard Law Review, and what little he wrote in the years after Harvard is clunky and sophomoric. And yet Dreams from My Father contains some of the most elegant, evocative sentences ever penned by a politician:
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, my questions like rocks roiling the water, the breaks in memory separating the currents....
Huh? Obama has been our president for more than two years, and hardly a day goes by without him blathering on about some issue. Jokes about his dependence on the teleprompter are a staple of the late-night television comics. The president's inaugural address -- which he surely didn't dash off casually, because he must have understood that this is the speech that one day will be carved into the marble wall of his monument -- contains not one memorable phrase or sentence. So how did he write the kinds of poetic, elegiac passages that make Dreams from My Father a literary near-masterpiece?
As Cashill shows, he didn't. And he demonstrates, with as much precision as you can get short of a DNA sample, that Dreams was actually written by Obama's Hyde Park colleague, friend and neighbor, the terrorist Bill Ayers. (There's even more evidence of Ayers' authorship in Cashill's book than in the articles about this he's written for American Thinker.) Oh, and Cashill reports two specific instances in which Ayers acknowledges his authorship of Dreams. That's interesting, to say the least.
Moving beyond the text of Dreams, Cashill does a masterful job walking readers through the details of Obama's complicated life, and showing why people who question every facet of Obama's bio are right to do so. How did such a mediocre student get into Columbia University, and then Harvard Law? If the "birthers" are nuts -- as Establishment pooh-bahs like George Will profess to believe -- how come the so-called "certificate of live birth" released online by the Obama team in 2008 doesn't list the name of the Honolulu hospital at which the future president is said to have been born. (My birth certificate lists the hospital. Doesn't yours? Have you ever seen a birth certificate that doesn't include the hospital's name?) And when lawyers in Kenya trying to track down anyone who might have a claim on the estate of Barack Obama Sr. contacted Obama's mother for the usual birth-certificate information about her son, how come she couldn't provide it? (By the way, Cashill pulls this troubling, but little-noticed incident, right out of Dreams. Also interesting -- or is "explosive" the better word.)
And it's even more interesting to read Cashill's riveting account of his mostly-futile efforts to get leading members of our country's mainstream media to take notice that something -- sorry, everything -- about Dreams and its purported author is seriously askew. And this is what makes Deconstructing Obama a seriously important book. Obama wouldn't be the first ambitious politician to have used a ghostwriter without giving credit to the wordsmith who made the rising star look good in print. But uniquely in Obama's case, his entire credibility during the 2008 campaign rested on his image as a brilliant man; a man who'd lived the multicultural life we'd been told could finally take our country beyond its racist, militaristic past and safely into the future.
By Deconstructing Obama page by page -- and piece by piece -- Cashill brings the reader to understand that in 2008 "Barak Obama" wasn't a candidate but a carefully created myth. The leftist mainstream media bought that myth, which is why they blew off Cashill and his overwhelming amount of evidence that so much about Obama was fraudulent. That's why Obama's close relationships with Ayers and with the vicious America-hater Jeremiah Wright were ignored by the mainstream media during the campaign, and also that telling comment by Michelle about her husband's candidacy being the first time she'd ever been proud of our country. After all, if any part of the myth turned out to be false, Obama's candidacy would have collapsed. That didn't happen, of course, and it's depressing to realize that when given the choice between a myth and a genuine war hero -- American voters chose the myth.
In the long run, reality always wins. Tomorrow, or next year, or sometime later this century the truth about Barack Obama will trickle out. And when that happens, "Barak Obama" will be exposed as a myth. And Jack Cashill will get the recognition he deserves as the best investigative journalist of our time.
The thing about ghost writers is, there's no shame in admitting you used one.
Unless, of course, you're trying to fool most of the people some of the time...
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Or if your ghost writer is so toxic it would be a disaster if he were discovered.
Has anyone compared Ayres' writing style to this book? Comparing Obama's only shows he didn't write it. What has Ayres written?
I wonder who really wrote Mein Jihad.This thread is chock full of the comparisons.
Ayers is a prolific writer and was given, as per multiple witnesses, Obama's unfinished notes, for Obama could not meet a deadline to save his myth...
In 1981, the 19 year-old Barack Obama published two poems in the spring 1981 edition of Occidental College's literary magazine, Feast.
One is a silly...
blah blah blah
copy & paste
copy & paste
copy & paste
:caning:
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You left outTypical loonie response which fits the mold:
The classic loonie debate:
• loonie gang bang
• fault the source
• point finger elsewhere
• namecalling
• insult integrity and intelligence
• answer a question with another question
• refuses to read info stating already knows what's in it
• BLAME BUSH!
It's a pattern easily recognizable, used in varying degrees, simultaneously and/or one jab at a time
You know he didn't even bother to read any of it.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/04/simon_schusters_revenge.htmlIn 1993, thirty-three-year-old Barack 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 a modicum of 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 -- providing its own 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 Democratic 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.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/04/the_mathematics_of_dreams_from.htmlThomas Bayes, an 18th century minister in England, discovered a theory of "conditional probability" in his attempt to use mathematical equations to prove or disprove the existence of God. Bayes' Theorem was published after his death by a colleague. It allows the computation of the probability of an event that we cannot prove with exact certitude from our observations of one or more related events that are provable. This theory can be applied to the question of authorship of Dreams from My Father using the observations included in Jack Cashill's well documented book Deconstructing Obama.
Along with many subjective observations from Mr. Cashill about stylistic inconsistencies between Dreams and three known written works of Obama, together with the stylistic consistencies between Dreams and William Ayers' book Fugitive Days, there is discussion by Mr. Cashill of a quantitative observation made by a Mr. Southwest of 759 similarities between Dreams and Fugitive Days. Of these 759 similarities, Mr. Cashill categorizes 180 as "striking similarities." One example set forth in his book Deconstructing Obama is a quotation from Carl Sandburg's poem "Chicago" which correctly reads "Hog Butcher for the World," and is incorrectly quoted in both Dreams and Fugitive Days as "hog butcher to the world." The similarity here is not only the exact same misquotation, but of all the poems to quote, of all the authors to quote, of all the lines to quote, why this author, why this poem, why this line?
Mr. Cashill's assessment of the number of similarities that exist between one of his books and Fugitive Days provides all the data needed to apply Bayes' Theorem to quantify both the probability that Obama is the true author of Dreams and the probability that Ayers is the true author of Dreams.
The quantitative assessments by Mr. Cashill on the number of similarities between one of his books, Sucker Punch, a memoir dealing extensively with race much like Dreams, and Fugitive Days provides the data needed to approximate the unknown probability distribution of similarities between two books written by different authors on much the same subject. Mr. Cashill found only six definite similarities, with a maximum of sixteen possible or definite similarities. Because of the multi-dimensional aspect of identifying similarities of any kind between two books, it makes sense to apply the Central Limit Theorem and assume this unknown probability distribution is of Gaussian form. Assume based on the data provided a most probable mean value of six, and a standard deviation of 10 for the distribution of similarities between two books on similar topics by different authors.
Bayes' Theorem for a problem where the probabilities of two mutually exclusive, non-overlapping events (lets call them A1 and A2) are to be computed assuming an event B is shown below (see http://stattrek.com/Lesson1/Bayes.aspx):
Event A1= Obama is the author of Dreams
Event A2= Ayers is the author of Dreams
Event B=Discovery of 180 striking similarities between Dreams and Fugitive Days
Z=P(A1)*P(B|A1)+P(A2)*P(B|A2)
P(A1|B)=P(A1)*P(B|A1)/Z
P(A2|B)=P(A2)*P(B|A2)/Z
P(A1|B) is to be read as the probability of event A1 given the event B. Similarly P(B|A1) is to be read as the probability of event B given event A1. The same for P(A2|B) and P(B|A2). P(A1) and P(A2) are the a priori probabilities of events A1 and A2 when event B is not even a glint on the horizon. When Dreams was published, the assumed probability of Obama as author was 100%. After all, the publisher listed Obama as author. How could it not be? But remember, other people have published books listing themselves as the author, and much later it was discovered that someone else had written the books for them. A famous case in point involving a former President would be Profiles in Courage. It was somewhat surprising to me initially, but made sense when I had completed the analysis, that one can assume any value for P(A1), or P(A2) for that matter, and Bayes' Theorem will produce the exact same result for the conditional probability of events A1 and A2 in this case.
The conditional probabilities of event B given events A1 or A2 are computed using the probability distribution described above for the number of similarities between two books on a similar subject by different authors. The probability of event B happening if event A1 is assumed, that is if you assume that Obama actually is the author of Dreams, is small. Very small. Using my 40 year old copy of Abramowitz and Stegun, it is one divided by ten to the power of fifty using only the "striking similarities" quoted by Mr. Cashill as event B. To give you a feel of the size of ten to the power of fifty, that is comparable to an estimate of the number of atoms in the universe. If you use all 759 similarities observed by Mr. Southwest, the probability is one divided by ten to the power of approximately twelve hundred. Both are ridiculously small numbers. Both are zero to 50 significant digits or more.
The results of my analysis using Bayes' Theorem for the conditional probabilities of events A1 and A2 are as follows:
P(A1|B)= 0.00% There is zero probability that Obama is the author of Dreams
P(A2|B)=100% There is 100% probability that Ayers is the author of Dreams
An assumption implicit in the analysis so far is that William Ayers is the one true author of Fugitive Days. Mathematically the symmetry of the similarities discovered by Mr. Southwest could be applied to question the authorship of Fugitive much as it has been applied to question the authorship of Dreams. And the result of applying Bayes' Theorem would predict, if one assumes Obama wrote Dreams, then it is virtually certain that he wrote Fugitive. What the mathematics is really proving is both Dreams and Fugitive are written by the same author with a probability of 100% out to many significant figures. That author is Ayers, Obama, or some third person yet unnamed.
In the absence of additional quantitative data looking for similarities between written works by these authors, I have to leave it to the experts in writing like Mr. Cashill to determine authorship based on motive, opportunity, and demonstrated writing ability. His book Deconstructing Obama makes a strong case that Ayers had the motive, opportunity, and demonstrated writing ability to write Dreams, and that Obama's writing ability is not up to the task of writing either book.
Jack CashillNewly released documents from Barack Obama Sr.'s immigration file, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, justify "birther" doubts about the nativity story on which Barack Obama based his presidential campaign.
The documents were posted Thursday in an article by Heather Smathers on the Arizona Independent web site. When I checked with Brian Wedemeyer, the Independent's managing editor, he confirmed, "They are legitimate documents."
A memo dated Aug. 31, 1961, from William Wood of the Immigration and Naturalization Services, does verify that Barack Obama, Sr. fathered a son, Barack Obama II, who was born in Honolulu on Aug, 4, 1961. For the record, most birthers of my acquaintance believe that Obama was born in the United States. That is not their issue.
Wood adds, however, that the child is "living with mother (she lives with her parents & subject resides at 1482 Alencastre St.)." He adds that Obama's citizen spouse plans "to go to Washington State University next semester."
This document thoroughly undermines the Obama nativity story, a story that has been told almost as often as Jesus's but with nowhere near the accuracy. Obama led with it in his 2004 convention speech and repeated it in the first sentence of his 2008 speech.
Friendly biographer David Remnick describes this story as Obama's "signature appeal: the use of the details of his own life as a reflection of a kind of multicultural ideal," and he underscores its essential role in Obama's ascendancy.
As Obama told the story in 2004, his father had grown up in Kenya "herding goats." His mother he traced to Kansas, as he always did. "My parents shared not only an improbable love," Obama continued, "they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation."
Obama refined his story for a critical speech in Selma, Alabama in March 2007, a speech that would define his presidential campaign.
"Something happened back here in Selma, Alabama," said Obama. This something "sent a shout across the ocean," which inspired the Barack Sr., still "herding goats" back in Kenya, to "set his sights a little higher."
This same something also "worried folks in the White House" to the point that the "the Kennedy's decided we're going to do an air lift."
Something about Selma apparently inspired Obama to manufacture facts more flagrantly than usual. Obama Sr. grew up speaking English and attending Christian schools. He was working as a clerk in Nairobi, not a goatherd, when he came to Hawaii in 1959. He came not on any formal airlift but as an independent student. The Republican Eisenhower, not the Democrat Kennedy, was the president when he came to the United States.
Although born in Kansas, Stanley Ann Dunham (Ann), Obama's mother, was not exactly Dorothy. She spent her formative years in the Seattle area where she earned the nickname "Anarchist Annie" under the tutelage of her hipster teachers. Selma had nothing to do with Obama's birth in any case. He was conceived four years before anyone outside of Alabama ever heard of the town.
The problems, of course, go deeper. According to divorce papers filed in 1964, Barack Sr. and Ann Dunham married in Wailuku, Maui, on February 2, 1961. One has to wonder, however, whether it was a marriage in anything but name or whether there was a marriage at all.
The immigration authorities certainly wondered. An April 1961 memo notes, "If his USC [United States Citizen] wife tries to petition for [Obama Sr.] make sure an investigation is conducted as to the bona-fide of the marriage."
In his memoir Dreams from My Father, Obama says, "In fact, how and when the marriage occurred remains a bit murky, a bill of particulars that I've never quite had the courage to explore."
No family or friend attended a wedding. In fact, no one in Obama Sr.'s clique seemed to know there was a relationship, let alone a wedding. Clique member Pake Zane could not recall Ann at all.
When current Hawaii governor Neil Abercrombie and Zane visited their friend in Nairobi in 1968, Barack Sr. shocked them by never once inquiring about his presumed wife and 6-year-old son.
The facts get more problematic still. After the birth of baby Barry in August 1961, Ann left for Seattle as soon as the doctors cleared her to travel. Once there, she enrolled at the University of Washington, not Washington Sate. Barack Sr. stayed behind in Hawaii.
The apolitical Washington state historical blog, HistoryLink, now confirms Ann's presence in the fall of 1961, identifies her Capitol Hill apartment in Seattle, names the courses she took, and documents an extended stay by Ann and little Barry into the summer of 1962.
If that is not proof enough, the 1961-1962 Polk Directory confirms an "Obama Anna Mrs studt" at the Capitol Hill address.
Somehow, this information escaped Obama's official campaign biography, Dreams, and four book-length biographies I consulted when researching my book Deconstructing Obama. Remnick's 2010 biography, The Bridge, concedes Ann's escape to Seattle but fudges the dates.
Even Janny Scott, the New York Times reporter who wrote the new biography, A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother, plays with the timeline. Ann Dunham promptly became pregnant, Scott writes in a New York Times excerpt, "dropped out of school, married him and gave birth shortly before their union ended." No, based on these documents, the union, if there was one, ended before Obama was born.
By the time mom and son returned to Hawaii in the summer of 1962, Barack Sr. had long since left for Harvard. There was no Obama family, never was, no "abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation" save on the teleprompters at the 2004 convention.
Obama knew all of this when he gave his televised Big-Brotherly talk to America's coerced schoolchildren in September 2009. It did not stop him from dissembling.
"I get it," he told the kiddies. "I know what that's like. My father left my family when I was two years old, and I was raised by a single mother." Does it get lower?
For the last two years or more, many in the birther community knew that Obama's "multicultural ideal" was based on a lie. Knowing that Obama was capable of lying about the first two years of his life, they had no reason to believe he was telling the truth about his birth, especially given the lengths he had gone to in order to protect his birth certificate.
For their part, the major media -- almost to a person -- were doing everything in their power to protect the lie. This was unprecedented on the sunny side of the Iron Curtain. The birthers had absolutely no reason to believe the media.
The media proved especially ignorant in their discussion of Obama's birth certificate. Last week, ABC's George Stephanopoulos set a new media low in his ambush of Rep. Michele Bachmann. In full partisan fury, he waved a copy of Obama's certification of live birth in her face as excitedly as if he had just discovered Al Capone's vault.
"Well I have the president's [birth] certificate right here," crowed the clueless Stephanopoulos, utterly unaware he had no such thing. Worse, what he did have had been floating around the Internet since 2008. "It's certified, it's got a certification number." Neither he nor his media colleagues seemed to know how foolish this spectacle appeared to the millions of Americans who knew better.
Given the historic performance of the president, and of the media, I think our birther friends are allowed a little grace time before they accept this new immaculately conceived certificate of live birth as Gospel. We would hate to have this too prove "fake but accurate."
Obama lies about where he met his wife. Why?
Barack Obama lied to the graduating class at the New Economic School in Moscow yesterday when he said:
"Pssst, Michelle. If anyone asks, remember to say we met at Harvard."
“Congratulations to the entire class of 2009. Congratulations to you. I don’t know if anybody else will meet their future wife or husband in class like I did, but I’m sure you’ll all going to have wonderful careers.”
What’s the lie?
He didn’t meet the future Mrs. Obama at Harvard Law School. In fact, they weren’t even at Harvard Law School at the same time. She graduated in 1988, but he didn’t graduated until 1991.
Where did they really meet?
A thousand miles from Harvard. In The Audacity of Hope, Obama’s best-selling memoir, he says, “I met Michelle in the summer of 1988, while we were both working at Sidley & Austin, a large corporate law firm based in Chicago. Although she is three years younger than me, Michelle was already a practicing lawyer, having attended Harvard Law straight out of college. I had just finished my first year at law school and had been hired as a summer associate.”
Why would the President lie about where they met?
Guilt by association. According to Wikipedia.com, “From 1984 to 1988, (unrepentant terrorist Bernadine) Dohrn was employed by the prestigious Chicago law firm Sidley Austin. She was hired by Howard Trienens, the head of the firm at that time, who knew Thomas G. Ayers, the father of Dohrn’s husband. “We often hire friends,” Trienens told a reporter for the Chicago Tribune. However, Dohrn had not been admitted to the New York or Illinois bar. She passed the New York bar exam but had not submitted an application to the New York Supreme Court’s Committee on Character and Fitness. She also passed the Illinois bar, but was turned down by the Illinois ethics committee because of her criminal record.”
Our theory: Obama never thought anyone would connect the dots between unrepentant terrorists Bill Ayers and his equally unrepentant wife Bernadine Dohrn. In fact, it’s likely that he never thought they’d become a campaign issue.
So even though Obama’s memoirs tell the truth about where he met his wife, he now sees a need to re-write history. His own history, that is.
Shock, horror! Oh the humanity! A politician caught lying. What has the world come to?![]()