Barack Obama is lying about not being friends with Bill Ayers...

[hogjack]

I did NOT have sex with that woman.

You would never have to make that claim.

It's kinda of a given.

 

[Slowlane]

You would never have to make that claim.

It's kinda of a given.

lame...

 

[Cap’n AMatrixca]

Jack's back...




Another episode of 24...

http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/12/the_improvised_odyssey_of_bara.html

The thesis is simple enough: Bill Ayers served as Barack Obama's muse in the creation of Obama's 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father. Ayers breathed creative life into this ungifted amateur, who had written nothing of note before, and reconceived him as a literary prodigy.


"I was astonished by his ability to write, to think, to reflect, to learn and turn a good phrase," said Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison of the Dreams' author. "I was very impressed. This was not a normal political biography." Agreed, it was not normal at all.


For simplicity's sake, I refer to the author of Dreams as "Obama." He provided the basic narrative and surely had the final say. Not content to merely edit, however, the highly skilled Ayers appears to have woven the rough strands of Obama's life with tales from Homer's Odyssey and spun a work of literature in the process.


Ayers leaves scarcely an Homeric trope unturned in his mining of the Odyssey to describe Obama's "personal interior journey." Before he completes his heroic cycle, Obama will confront green-eyed seductresses, blind seers, lotus-eaters, the "ghosts" of the underworld, whirlpools, and about a half dozen sundry "demons." It was not, however, until I identified a menacing one-eyed bald man in Dreams that I became convinced that the parallelism was conscious.

 

[Cap’n AMatrixca]

JUST a professor of literature...

Early in his own 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days, Ayers tips his Homeric hand. "Memory sails out upon a murky sea-wine-dark, opaque, unfathomable," he writes with a knowing wink. "Wine-dark" is quintessential Homer. Best-selling author Thomas Cahill named his book on ancient Greece, Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea. It did not surprise me to learn that Cahill had attended my high school, but then again so had Weather Underground member, Brian Flanagan, who took the same Greek courses I did. Ayers and pals may have been lunatics, but they were literate ones.


Dreams and the Odyssey both begin in media res, a literary technique in which the narrative starts in mid-story and not from the literal beginning. Odysseus's son, Telemachus, is twenty when the Odyssey begins. Obama, now in New York, tells the reader he has just turned twenty-one at the outset of Dreams.


More intriguing, each begins with the young protagonist receiving an unexpected call that inspires him to seek out his missing father. The goddess Athena, in disguise, gives Telemachus the word. In Dreams, it is Obama's Aunt Jane from Nairobi. Odysseus had quit the isle of Ithaca and abandoned his son to fight in the Trojan War when Telemachus was a month old. Obama's father quit the isle of Hawaii and abandoned his son for Harvard when Obama was two.

 

[Cap’n AMatrixca]

... a ghost-writer by trade...

Ayers, by the way, so liked the dramatic structure of the Dreams' opening sequence that he repeated it in Fugitive Days, which also opens in media res with a dramatic phone call. Ayers learns that the woman he then loved, Diana Oughton, had been killed in a Greenwich Village bomb blast. Like Obama, he has a hard time understanding what he is hearing. He drops the line in shock, and the conversation ends abruptly just as it does in Dreams.


A serious student of literature -- Hyde Park neighbor Rashid Khalidi gives Ayers major credit for helping with his book, Resurrecting Empire -- Ayers has written thoughtfully about the art of the memoir. "The reader must actually see the struggle," he writes in an essay, "Narrative Push/Narrative Pull." "It's a journey, not by a tourist, but by a pilgrim."

 

[Cap’n AMatrixca]

Obama's deceptions on Religion

Obama hid his Unitarian connections during the campaign. In a 2006 speech, Obama explained:


"I was not raised in a particularly religious household, as undoubtedly many in the audience were. My father, who returned to Kenya when I was just two, was born Muslim but as an adult became an atheist. My mother, whose parents were non-practicing Baptists and Methodists, was probably one of the most spiritual people and kindest people I've ever known, but grew up with a healthy skepticism of organized religion herself. As a consequence, so did I."


But Obama's 2006 speech contradicted his own memoir Dreams from My Father (p17) in which he writes of his grandfather:


"In his only skirmish into organized religion, he would enroll the family in the local Unitarian Universalist congregation...."


Stanley and Madelyn Dunham in 1955 picked up and relocated 2,000 miles from Texas to Seattle. The next year they relocated to Mercer Island specifically so their daughter, Obama's future mother Stanley Ann Dunham could attend Mercer Island High School. Another attraction: The East Shore Unitarian Church, also a hotbed of leftist activism.


One year earlier, Mercer Island schools had distinguished themselves in a way which might have caused others to avoid them. The Chicago Tribune explains,


"In 1955, the chairman of the Mercer Island school board, John Stenhouse, testified before the House Un-American Activities Subcommittee that he had been a member of the Communist Party."


After intense debate, Stenhouse decided not to resign from the school board according to an April 11, 1955 account in Time Magazine.


Stenhouse was not the only leftist connected to the school. The Seattle Times explains:


One respite (from Americans Stanley Ann Dunham looked down on) was found in a wing of Mercer Island High called "anarchy alley." Jim Wichterman taught a wide-open philosophy course that included Karl Marx. Next door, Val Foubert taught a rigorous dose of literature, including Margaret Mead's writings on homosexuality.


Those classes prompted what Wichterman, now 80 and retired in Ellensburg, called "mothers' marches" of parents outraged at the curriculum.


Dunham thrived in the environment, Wichterman said.


"As much as a high-school student can, she'd question anything: What's so good about democracy? What's so good about capitalism? What's wrong with communism? What's good about communism?" Wichterman said. "She had what I call an inquiring mind."


She also showed her politics, wearing a campaign button for Adlai Stevenson. And despite flirting with atheism, she went to services at East Shore Unitarian church, a left-leaning congregation in Bellevue.


The Chicago Tribune mentions a description of the Dunham's chosen church as "The Little Red Church on the Hill". According to its own website, East Shore Unitarian Church got that name because of, "Well-publicized debates and forums on such controversial subjects as the admission of ‘Red China' to the United Nations...." Mercer Island's John Stenhouse, according to his 2000 obituary, once served as church president possibly contributing to the ‘red' label.


The Dunhams moved to Honolulu in 1960 after Ann graduated and quickly became friends with leftists such as now-Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-HI) and Communist Party member Frank Marshall Davis. Obama's mother-to-be enrolled at the University of Hawaii and soon met Barack Obama Sr. in a Russian language class. She would remain affiliated with the University for most of her life.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/12/obama_from_unitarian_to_libera_1.html

 

[Ishmael]

Obama's deceptions on Religion



http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/12/obama_from_unitarian_to_libera_1.html

OK, that's FUNNY!!!!!!!!

I was speaking with a Unitarian friend recently who caught me up on what's the latest rage in the church discussions. I looked at him and said, "You know, I'm getting the feeling that the Unitarian Church is were guilt ridden agnostics go to feel good about themselves."

He thought for a minute and said, "I think you've got a point there."

Ishmael

 

[Cap’n AMatrixca]

Amen, a man, a mission; Barack Obama: Mission Man!





A visionary for a Unitariated World



Red Dawn!

 

[Cap’n AMatrixca]

Barack took two days off to write his inaugural speech.






The man who wrote THAT speech did not write Obama's book.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Jack is back!

While waiting for America's publishers to find their nerve, I had put my research into the authorship of Barack Obama's 1995 memoir Dreams From My Father on the back shelf.* But then I heard Chris Matthews.

The Hardball host was weighing in on the subject of Sarah Palin's new book deal.* "Sarah Palin - now don't laugh - is writing a book," sneered Matthews. "Not just reading a book, writing a book."

"Actually in the word of the publisher she's "collaborating" on a book," Matthews continued.* "What an embarrassment! It's one of these ‘I told you,' books that jocks do. You know she's already declared, I mean, why they do it like this? ‘She can't write, we got a collaborator for her.'"

I dedicate what follows to Matthews and those willfully blind souls like him.* It is a work in progress, a collective one at that, aided and abetted by nearly a score of volunteer co-conspirators from Hawaii to Ohio to Israel to Australia.* The thesis is simple enough: Barack Obama needed substantial help to write his 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father.* Moreover, unlike Sarah Palin, Obama chose to conceal the identity of his collaborator and not without good reason. To admit that he needed a collaborator would have undercut his campaign for president and to reveal the name of that collaborator would have ended it.

My involvement in this occasionally harrowing literary adventure began in July 2008, entirely innocently.* A friend sent me some short excerpts from Dreams and asked if they were as radical as they sounded.** I bought the book, located the excerpts, and reported back that, in context, the excerpts were not particularly troubling.

But I did notice something else. The book was much too well written. I had seen enough of Obama's interviews to know that he did not speak with anywhere near the verbal sophistication on display in Dreams.

...

Looking for some scientific verification, I consulted Patrick Juola of Duquesne, a leading authority in the field of literary forensics.* Juola, however, advised me against relying on computer analysis on a subject this sensitive. "The accuracy just isn't there," he told me. He encouraged me instead "to do what you're already doing . . . good old-fashioned literary detective work."* I took his advice.

The first question I had to resolve was whether the 33 year-old Barack Obama was capable of writing what Time Magazine has called "the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician."* The answer is almost assuredly "no."

In his bestselling study of success, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell painstakingly lays out what he calls the "ten-thousand-hour rule."* Gladwell quotes neurologist Daniel Levitin to the effect that "ten thousand hours of practice [in any subject] is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert" and cites example after example to make his case.

Obama appears to have lopped about 9900 hours off that standard.* In Dreams, he speaks of writing only the occasional journal entry and some "very bad poetry." *

...

If possible, Obama's early prose showed less promise than his poetry.* Although the Obama camp has been notoriously shy about releasing proof of Obama's assumed genius-SAT scores, LSAT scores, transcripts, theses-I was able to unearth three essays in print that predate Dreams.

In March 1983, Obama wrote an 1800-word article, "Breaking the War Mentality," for Columbia University's weekly news magazine, Sundial.** Five years later, he wrote an essay titled "Why Organize," which was reprinted in a 1990 book called After Alinsky: Community Organizing in Illinois.

In the Sundial article there are an appalling five sentences in which the subject noun does not agree with the verb.* In some sentences, like the following, the punctuation and word selection are as random as the grammar: "The belief that moribund institutions, rather than individuals are at the root of the problem, keep SAM's energies alive."

Although "Why Organize" seems to be better edited, in neither of these two clunky essays does Obama turn a single phrase that is clever, concise, or even vaguely memorable. In 1990, he wrote an unsigned student case comment for the Harvard Law Review.* The prose here, although reasonably well edited, is even more dull and leaden.

It was not Obama's style but his election as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review in 1990-more of a popularity than a literary contest-that netted him a roughly $125,000 advance for a proposed book.* According to a 2006 article by liberal publisher Peter Osnos, Simon & Schuster canceled the contract when Obama could not deliver, despite a sojourn to Bali to help him write.

...

Ayers, we know, provided an informal editing service for like-minded friends in the neighborhood.* Aspiring radical Rashid Khalidi attests to this in the acknowledgements in his 2004 book, Resurrecting Empire. "Bill was particularly generous in letting me use his family's dining room table to do some writing for the project." Khalidi did not need the table.* He had one of his own.* He needed the help.* Having no political ambitions, Khalidi was willing to acknowledge it.

Dreams* was published in June 1995. That same year, Ayers was busy fueling the ambitions of his young protégé, first with an appointment to the chair of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge grant and later with a fundraiser in his Chicago home.* Ayers admits that his "imagination ran out of steam." He thought he was launching a mayor that he could exploit, even control, not a president, who would move quickly beyond his grasp.

After Dreams was published in 1995, Obama's typewriter fell silent once again.* He contributed not one signed word to any law journal or other publication of note until his unexceptional and conspicuously ghosted 2006 book, Audacity of Hope.* Obama was not a writer.* As his lame inaugural address proved, he still isn't.

...


For the literary left, the fact that Ayers helped Obama would be a less troubling revelation than that Obama needed help at all.* They have built a foundational myth around his genius, a genius that can be located only in Dreams.* The dark side of the Democrat genius mythology, of course, is the Republican dunce mythology of which Sarah Palin and George Bush are the most recent victims.

There is thus a logic to the left's willful blindness.* Why the literary right has accepted this charade continues to baffle me.


http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/05/who_wrote_dreams_and_why_it_ma_1.html

 

[off2bed]

I read Outliers. Part of the 10,000 hour rule is you have to actually get good at what you're doing. Obama must have 10,000 hours of teleprompter reading time, nothing else.

Who writes their memoir at age 36?

 

[overthebow]

14 pages so far.

Damn! I loves me a good wingnut echo chamber.

Keep up the good work.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Its only politics, you can't get too caught up in it.

They all do what they must to win. Only Bill Ayers and Obama know if they are truly friends.

Bernadette would know...

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Jack's back...

...
If portions of Audacity sound like outtakes from stump speeches, it is because they are outtakes from stump speeches. This can be proved. What cannot be proved, but what seems likely, is that Obama included just "enough of the narrative voice" from Dreams to maintain continuity between the two books.

The question remains -- who provided that narrative voice? In the criticism of my last two American Thinker articles, only the Washington Post addressed the central issue, and it did so facetiously: "The book [Dreams] is beautifully written and yet, in Cashill's opinion, Obama is - and always was - a crappy (his word, not mine) writer."

Critics, please forget for a minute the parallel styles, words, phrases, images, and anecdotes shared by Dreams and Bill Ayers' books. Forget for a minute Bill Ayers. The three existing samples of Obama's prose before Dreams -- the 1983 article "Breaking the War Mentality," the 1988 article "Why Organize," and his unsigned 1990 Harvard Law Review case note -- are proof enough that Barack Obama is, in fact, a crappy writer.
...
In my 25-year career in advertising and publishing I have had to review the portfolios of at least a thousand professional writers. I can tell within three paragraphs whether a writer deserves a second look. Based on any of his pre-Dreams samples, Obama would not have made the first cut. I never would have hired him. No one would have. He is simply a crappy writer.

I have also taught writing at enough levels and under enough different circumstances to know that even the best teacher cannot transform a crappy writer into a great writer. The best that the teacher can hope for is a semi-crappy writer who does not make too many grammatical errors.

Between Harvard and Dreams, Obama had no extra training. In a 2006 article, written while he was still seething, liberal publisher Peter Osnos tells the story of what did happen during those lost years.

According to Osnos, the New York Times did a profile of Obama when elected the first black leader of the Harvard Law Review. The article prompted literary agent Jane Dystel to have Obama submit a book proposal to an imprint of Simon & Schuster. The publisher liked the proposal and advanced him about $125,000. "Several years passed," Osnos writes, "and Obama was too busy finishing law school and embarking on his career to get the book done." Simon & Schuster then canceled the contract, and Obama likely had to pay at least some of it back.

Dystel then approached Times Book at Random House where Osnos was publisher, and he advanced Obama $40,000 more. The newly inspired Obama promptly turned in what Time Magazine has called "the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician." Osnos believes Obama wrote the book himself, but he was in no position to know that. My publisher has to accept on faith that I am writing my own books. Even my agent does.

Obama's memoir was published in June 1995. In January of that same magical year, Ayers had chosen Obama, then a junior lawyer at a minor law firm, to chair the multi-million dollar Chicago Annenberg Challenge grants. In the fall of 1995, Ayers and his wife, Weatherwoman Bernardine Dohrn, launched Obama's ascent to political stardom with a fundraiser in their Chicago home.

Dreams sold modestly in 1995, and the rights to it eventually reverted to Random House's Crown Books Division, which made a killing on the book after Obama's keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic convention.
...
The emergence of Jon Favreau, whom Time Magazine calls a "wunderkind wordsmith," complicates this scenario. After a February 2009 speech to Congress, the Washington Post ran a photo of Obama holding the speech, on the first page of which was clearly printed, "Draft 2/24/09 12pm...Favreau/Rhodes." It even included Favreau's phone number.

According to Wikipedia, "Favreau was hired as Obama's speechwriter shortly after Obama's election to the United States Senate. Obama and Favreau grew close, and Obama has referred to him as his ‘mind reader.'" Obama thought highly enough of Favreau to make him his chief speechwriter for the presidential campaign. The London Guardian reports that Favreau carries Dreams wherever he goes and can "conjure up his master's voice as if an accomplished impersonator."

Of the thirty-eight speeches during Favreau's tenure that found their way into Audacity are we to believe that he wrote none of them? It is much more likely that he wrote all of them. Yes, Obama may have written his thoughts down in longhand, but why would he not have given those notes to his gifted young speechwriter to polish?

Here is what I believe happened. Obama knew he had a problem on his hands when Dreams was republished in 2004. He recruited Ayers to write the (post-modernist) preface to the 2004 edition, but once he was elected to the Senate they both knew that Ayers was poison. To achieve continuity, Ayers, I believe, wrote the prologue to Audacity. It is the best-written part of the book. From here, Favreau took over. An "accomplished impersonator," he labored to make extended passages of Audacity sound like Dreams. It was a good effort, but he simply does not write as well as Ayers does.

Those who think Ayers cannot write either have not read him or do not have the wherewithal to judge him. In a recent critique of us "Internet zanies," Republican bigwig Ken Blackwell (why the attacks from the right?) observes, "Bill Ayers' thoughts have all the leaden quality of most deadening Marxist screeds. Ayers' writing you can't pick up; Obama's you can't put down." No, Ken, Ayers writes very well indeed. Fugitive Days is a better book than Dreams.

To be sure, Obama does not mention Ayers in the acknowledgments section of Dreams. In a similar spirit he slights Favreau in Audacity. He merely thanks a number of his Senate staff, "including Pete Rouse, Karen Kornbluh, Mike Strautmanis, Jon Favreau, Mark Lippert, Joshua DuBois, and especially Robert Gibbs and Chris Lu" for reading the manuscript, but of course, "on their own time."

I imagine that Favreau made his contribution on his own time as well.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/07/who_wrote_audacity_of_hope_1.html

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

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.
...

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.

The National Review's Steve Diamond has documented that both Ayers and Obama worked on a significant 1988 educational reform project in Chicago.
Although CEO of a major power company, Commonwealth Edison, Bill Ayers's father, Tom, also worked on this same project. Tom Ayers was a prominent client of Sidley Austin, and it stands to reason that he got Dohrn her job.

Given her contempt conviction for refusing to cooperate in a terrorist investigation, a conviction that prevented her from actually practicing law, Dohrn would have needed major league pull to get hired by a high end law firm like Sidley. A few years later, of all the law firms in Chicago, it was Sidley Austin that 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, 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.

Jack Cashill
The (hated by the Left) American Thinker

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

The major media will not likely tackle the emerging evidence of Obama's stunning literary fraud, but the days of Obama's boasting about his writing skills are just as likely over.

The immediate cause of concern at the White House is Christopher Andersen's largely benign new book, Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage.

Andersen contends that the ambitious Obama, unaware of JFK's own literary fraud, hoped to launch his own political career with a book as did John Kennedy with the discreetly ghost-written Profiles In Courage.

Despite a large advance, Obama found himself "hopelessly blocked." After four futile years of trying to finish, Obama "sought advice from his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers." This he did "at Michelle's urging," she being the more pragmatic half of the couple.

What attracted the Obamas were "Ayers's proven abilities as a writer." Barack particularly liked the fluid novelistic style of To Teach, a 1993 book by Ayers. This he hoped to emulate for his own family history. In fact, he had already taped interviews with many of his relatives, both African and American. The key sentence in Andersen's account is the one that follows:

"These oral histories, along with his partial manuscript and a trunkload of notes were given to Ayers." Adds Andersen, "Thanks to help from veteran writer Ayers, Barack would be able to submit a manuscript to his editors at Times Book." The manuscript in question would become Obama's 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father, what Joe Klein of Time Magazine called "the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician."

From textual sleuthing, I had come to a comparable conclusion more than a year ago, namely that Obama had "turned the framework of his life over to terrorist emeritus Bill Ayers who roughed it in with his own darker sentiments and experiences." Embedded here is a visual summary of this research, produced by Chris Kusnell. (Part I) (Part II)

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/09/literary_lion_obama_will_roar.html

Jack Cashill

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Liar-In-Chief

Andersen writes from within the gates. He has no agenda. His book is dispassionate, softly liberal and largely sympathetic to the Obamas, particularly to Michelle and her family. A popular celebrity journalist, he interviewed some 200 people for the book, many of them close to the Obama family. The Obamas had likely given at least their tacit blessing to the project. Given that the natural audience for his book skews female and left, Andersen had no reason to invent facts that would alienate his base. He has no track record of doing the same.

Although Andersen cites me on textual comparisons, I was clearly not the source for the personal details of Obama's life. His retelling of the story was based on what he had been told by someone very close to the action. He had access to people who would never have talked to me, quite possibly Michelle herself or even Bill Ayers.

Clearly shaken, the Obama-centric media find themselves in a fix not unlike that of medieval astronomers upon discovery of a new planet. Every time this happened, these geocentrists had to figure out a convoluted new loop to describe the planet's rotation around the earth. So it is with challenges to the Obama myth, even unwitting ones like Andersen's. Obama's acolytes must find some convoluted new explanation to account for each unexpected deviance from the mythic overview.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

"I've written two books," Obama told a crowd of students and teachers in Virginia last year. "I actually wrote them myself."

The media should be able to protect his reputation among the willfully blind but don't expect to hear Obama make comparable boasts in the near future.

Liar, liar, pants on fire...

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

More Important than a Birth Certificate!

The Affirmative Action President

Barack and Michelle Obama find themselves in an odd psychological trap with Bill Ayers. It finally appears that Jack Cashill's landmark work in exposing the real authorship of Barack Obama's books, has found corroboration in "Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage," by Christopher Andersen.

The weight and plausibility of Cashill's findings of similarity between Ayer's writing and Obama's first autobiography were substantial, but now appears confirmed by Andersen.

Cashill writes: 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."

This brings up a curious and odd psychological situation for the Obamas. They have become rich through the work of the white Ayers. Work that Barack Obama could never have succeeded at alone.

Mark Butterworth
The American Thinker

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

James Lewis noted in 2008: ". . . Barack and Michelle seem to suffer from real feelings of inferiority. Michelle is a Princess of Privilege -- Princeton University, Harvard Law School and her 300K job today. And yet, she tells us that she spent years feeling bad about being black in America, as she told the world in her undergraduate thesis, at the very time when blacks are moving ahead faster than ever before in human history."

Michelle wrote in her thesis introduction, "My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'blackness' than ever before," and that "I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don't belong. Regardless of the circumstances underwhich (sic) I interact with whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be black first and a student second."

At best, she prophesied for herself a marginal future - "further integration and/or assimilation into a white cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society; never becoming a full participant."

She has proven to be resentful over the fact that her accomplishments have come through affirmative action and not merit as when told in high school she wouldn't qualify for an Ivy League college because her test scores weren't high enough, and later had trouble with the Illinois bar exam.

A lot of colleges like Princeton also do a bang up job of making sure that minority students (who have included Obama and Sotomayor) never bond early on with whites students by holding separate orientation sessions for them, thus further encouraging any sense of alienation and separateness they feel.

All of Michelle's adult achievements have come through whites. The Ivy League colleges, the law firm she worked at, and then the University of Chicago. The same is true for Barack.

As for Barack, he is half-white and raised as a relatively privileged white boy except for his time in Indonesia when he was bullied for being culturally different and black .

Culturally, though, Barack is white. He learned to think, observe, speak, and imagine life through white culture and family. His life story is the unrelenting quest to purge all that whiteness from himself that he might assume the mantle of his coal black father, and ascend to lead his "people" (the oppressed) to freedom and prosperity out of the hateful clutches of the White Man.

The way for Barack to escape the problem of thinking "white" was to adopt Marxism as a way out of his dilemma: a black who'd been raised white. He now saw the world in purely class and racial terms.

Yet, everything he is and became depended on whites. His privileged education, his community work, his law firm and professorship - all provided by whites.

And Bill Ayers, whose help in Obama's adult life remains hidden to a large extent, has nonetheless been critical. Especially for the money conscious Michelle who complained $600 from a tax rebate to folks was only good enough for a decent pair of earrings, and spends $540 for a pair of fashionable sneakers (or kicks).

"You're getting $600. What can you do with that? Not to be ungrateful or anything. . . And then you go out and you buy a pair of earrings."

The Obamas, both of them, have been accused of being racists. Barack for his Marxist sentiments and worldview, his association with the vicious Rev. Wright ("white people's greed runs a world in need" which he wholeheartedly endorsed vuia 20 years' regular attendance), the remark of his grandmother being "a typical white person", comments in his books, "that's just how white folks' will do ya", and his classic explanation to a group of rich, elite whites how their low class brethren in Pennsylvania are "bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment".

But, some will say, the Obamas are surrounded by whites, they have white friends, they've always worked and played with whites. They can't be racists.

Liberals think that white racists, KKKers must hate all blacks. That's not how it works. A person can very much like, enjoy, work with individuals of other races without any difficulty, but find collective fault or general dislike for another race as a whole.

Barack gives Bill Ayers and the other whites of his circle a pass because they have transcended membership in an evil class of people by despising their own race as much as people from other races and cultures do. Marxists and liberals deracinate themselves in the eyes of people like the Obamas; just as people like Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne, Sammy Davis Junior, Louis Armstrong, and numerous other blacks seemed deracinated and non-threatening to whites throughout the 50's and 60's.

Barack likes individual whites like David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel, and so on, but he is filled with rage at whites in general for all that went wrong with his childhood, his abandonment by his father, and so forth; whereas Michelle was raised with a chip on her shoulder in white-run Chicago, marinated in the resentments and attitudes of Jesse Jackson and his ilk to blame everything wrong with blacks on slavery and unrelenting, ever oppressive racism of whitey.

Many critics of Obama have observed that the narcissistic Barack appears to be a compulsive liar. Part of that pathology, though, appears to be his ability to convince himself of things that never were.

He loves to repeat his life story in hopes of inspiring others how he was abandoned by his father at the age of two and managed to become President of the United States. Which is no mean achievement. Yet, the facts are that after his birth, his mother never lived with Barack Sr. again. Instead, his mother moved with their newborn baby a mere fifteen days after his birth to Seattle to go to school there.

Barack never knew his father at all. Not even as an infant or toddler.

Granted that his story of abandonment at age two is sad enough that it hardly needs embellishment, still, we see a crumb of pathos in that additional, fictional amount of time that says, "I did know my dad a little for a tiny little while." Kind of like, "we at least had Hawaii for a brief time together."

But he didn't even have that.

So here we have Barack -- raised by whites, protected and privileged by whites, guided by whites, funded by whites, managed by whites, and finally, elected by whites. And someone who has turned all his inner rage into a diatribe against the society of whites and its free markets, liberties, government, culture, traditions, and beliefs.

And we have Michelle, affirmed by whites, promoted by whites, enriched by whites, and angry that all her success came, not from her own community, but as spoils from condescending whites, liberal guilt and noblesse oblige to less brilliant "coloreds" such as herself.

Affirmative Action

Best way to suppress the best and brightest in favor of Wrighting a racial wrong not even perpetuated upon the recipient of the largess...

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

It is now abundantly clear that the image of Barack Obama sold to the American electorate was tightly edited, air-brushed, and exaggerated. He has worn a series of masks -- eloquent orator, brilliant scholar, centrist, and literary sensation. All of these masks are coming off as he copes with a job for which image will not suffice. *For instance, hiding behind the eloquent orator mask is a guy who says "uhh" a lot when he is winging it, and who makes lots of factual and grammatical mistakes.

Now, thanks to Jack Cashill, the literary mask has been removed. Obama is a literary pretender. Case closed. The evidence is overwhelming that Bill Ayers ghost-wrote Dreams from my Father, the book which established Obama's pose as a brilliant writer (and therefore a fine mind, in the estimation of many). The stylistic resemblance between the Dreams and Ayers' work is stunning. Now we know, thanks to Chris Andersen's new book,that Obama hit a brick wall trying to fulfill his contract to produce a book, and shipped off his notes and tapes to Ayers. That is the classic description of a ghost writer's assignment. And it completely fits the theories Cashill had inferentially reasoned from the data of his literary studies.

The revelation that Chris Andersen had two separate sources means that this fact meets the journalistic standard of reliability, provided by a respected, established bestselling author. Obama's dismissal of Ayers as "just a guy in the neighborhood" has been shown to be an outright lie.


Thomas Lifson
American Thinker
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/09/unmasking_obama.html

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Barack Obama has displayed a disturbing pattern of work ethics: shirking work; claiming success when he was not entitled to do so; hiding his failures; and claiming the work of others as his own -- when it was successful. These are not character traits that we should associate with Presidents.

Barack Obama won praise for Dreams From My Father, a 1995 memoir of his life that was published when he reached the grand old age of thirty-four. The provenance of the book has come into question, led by a series of American Thinker columns by Jack Cashill, who used textual analysis to ascribe its writing --or at least a good portion of it -- to Bill Ayers, Obama's neighbor, former Weatherman, Obama campaign supporter and partner in various activist groups in Chicago. This claim has been echoed in a new book by best-selling author Christian Andersen, Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage who wrote that sources close to the Obamas told him that Barack Obama turned over his notes and tapes to Bill Ayers to compose the book.

Subsequently, under questioning by Cashill on a nationally-syndicated radio program, Andersen averred that two separate sources in Hyde Park confirmed to him the story of sending the notes and tapes to Ayers.

Whoever wrote Dreams clearly embellished Obama's work history following graduation from Columbia. Obama claimed to have worked at a high powered consulting firm as a research assistant. A former colleague who sat down the hall from him debunked Obama's puffery in 2005:

First, it wasn't a consulting house; it was a small company that published newsletters on international business. Like most newsletter publishers, it was a bit of a sweatshop. I'm sure we all wished that we were high-priced consultants to multinational corporations. But we also enjoyed coming in at ten, wearing jeans to work, flirting with our co-workers, partying when we stayed late, and bonding over the low salaries and heavy workload.

Barack worked on one of the company's reference publications. Each month customers got a new set of pages on business conditions in a particular country, punched to fit into a three-ring binder. Barack's job was to get copy from the country correspondents and edit it so that it fit into a standard outline. There was probably some research involved as well, since correspondents usually don't send exactly what you ask for, and you can't always decipher their copy. But essentially the job was copyediting.

Obama may have felt the need to polish a resume that would fit on the back of a postage stamp, as my colleague Kyle Shiver has characterized his curriculum vitae. But the problem goes deeper than Cashill may have uncovered.

As a young attorney did he engage in the grind that is the fate of all young associates in law firms? Was he buried in books at the law firm library, barely able to keep his eyes open? Was he paying his dues? Not quite. Instead, he can be pictured with his feet up on his desk, scribbling ideas on a legal pad for Dreams of My Father -- the book that helped make him a star.

Allison Davis, a founding name partner of the firm that hired the young Barack Obama out of law school had this bit of history to share:
"Some of my partners weren't happy with that, Barack sitting there with his keyboard on his lap and his feet up on the desk writing the book."

I am sure Barack Obama's fellow associates were none-too-pleased, either. They were doing the work that paid for his salary. To whom did he bill his time? Tony Rezko? We will never know, since Barack Obama refused to release his billing records.

Incidentally, he did not finish the book when he was contractually required to do so. He jetted off to Bali, purportedly to work full-time on the book. Now, I ask you dear reader, is there any place in the world less conducive to work -- especially the arduous, thankless task of writing -- than a lush tropical paradise like Bali? Even the novelist James Michener had to wait until returning to the states to write a book about his time in the South Pacific. Nevertheless, somehow, miraculously, the manuscript was later completed -- but by whom?

Not content with the practice of law -- or whatever he was doing at the office, Obama left the law firm for greener pastures. While he was on the verge of running for the state Senate, he was tapped (by Bill Ayers, no less) to head the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a donor-funded effort to improve Chicago schools. This was the only time that Obama had experience running anything.

How did he do?

He wasted over 100 million dollars and the program was declared a failure in an independent audit. Did we hear much about this failure?

No. A cover-up shielded Barack Obama from being blamed for the program's failure. Access to records was denied to researchers. Stanley Kurtz appeared on the Milt Rosenberg radio show on WGN in Chicago to report his findings. The show was bombarded by the talk radio equivalent of computer denial of service attacks: a blizzard of phone calls, intimidating and harsh, that tried to shut down the show and silence Kurtz. The attack was coordinated by the Obama campaign.

So much for transparency, and welcome to 1984, delayed two decades or so.

When he became a state senator were their instances that revealed work practices that might rub people the wrong way? Yes there were.

His state senate colleagues took umbrage at his modus operandi. He was what came to be known as a bill-jacker: someone who takes credit for legislation that others had written and worked the aisles to get passed.

He had a powerful patron, state Senate leader Emil Jones, who blessed this practice as a way to promote the career of a friend:

Back in his days as a state legislator, one of Obama's early claims was that he passed a "major" ethics bill in Springfield, Illinois the State Capitol. But, author David Freddoso's research for the book The Case Against Barack Obama finds that Obama didn't actually write the legislation but that Illinois State Senator Emil Jones merely allowed him to take the lead of an already crafted bill. Freddoso calls Obama's role "bill-jacking" as opposed to crafting.

...Abner Mikva, a former congressman and federal judge, had recommended to Jones that he give Obama a popular piece of legislation barring political fundraising on state property and barring lobbyists and contractors from giving gifts to legislators. The bill had enough loopholes to be relatively harmless, but it was a step in the direction of reform. Jones gave it to Obama. Obama proposed it. It passed, 52-4.18 The "Friends and Family" man, the old ward-heeler, was even capable of making Obama look like a reformer.

Instead of taking the lead in writing and proposing legislation, it has been Obama's practice to join bills crafted by other people and attempt to take a partial or full measure of credit not due him.

Old habits die hard-he carried on the noisome practice when he became a U.S. Senator.


After weeks of arduous negotiations, on April 6, 2006, a bipartisan group of senators burst out of the "President's Room," just off the Senate chamber, with a deal on new immigration policy.

As the half-dozen senators -- including John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Edward M. KennedySen.. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), who made a request common when Capitol Hill news conferences are in the offing: "Hey, guys, can I come along?" And when Obama went before the microphones, he was generous with his list of senators to congratulate -- a list that included himself.

"I want to cite Lindsey Graham, Sam Brownback, Mel Martinez, Ken Salazar, myself, Dick Durbin, Joe Lieberman . . . who've actually had to wake up early to try to hammer this stuff out," he said.

To Senate staff members, who had been arriving for 7 a.m. negotiating sessions for weeks, it was a galling moment. Those morning sessions had attracted just three to four senators a side, Sen.. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) recalled, each deeply involved in the issue. Obama was not one of them. But in a presidential contest involving three sitting senators, embellishment of legislative records may be an inevitability, Specter said with a shrug.

He "embellished" his role-as the Washington Post politely put it.

Any more examples of his modus operandi? Why yes, there are!

Barack Obama had the audacity to claim to have worked across the aisle with John McCain on ethics legislation (a two-fer: he claimed bipartisanship and having worked on a bill) when in fact, that was a "misrepresentation" or "blooper" as FactCheck.Org (a highly regarded, non-partisan monitoring group) so delicately put it:

"I worked with John McCain" on ethics legislation. In fact, the two worked together for barely a week, after which McCain accused Obama of "partisan posturing" and added, "I won't make the same mistake again."

Obama offered a twisted account of his working with a Republican and "against party loyalty." He said he "worked with John McCain" on ethics legislation, when in fact their short-lived collaboration collapsed into bitter public wrangling long before any bill resulted.

How about claiming to be on a committee that had just successfully passed out some high-profile bit of legislation?

Barack Obama today boasted about a bill in "my committee,'' a committee on which he has no seat.

While speaking to the press in the Israeli town of Sderot, Obama mistakenly put the U.S. Senate banking committee on his resume, although the Illinois senator does not serve on the committee and Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) is the chairman.

The Republican National Committee distributed an e-mail pointing out Obama's mistake with a subject line of "Obama's Gaffe Machine Rolls Into Israel."

During the press conference, Obama said, "Just this past -- this past week, we passed out of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, which is my committee, a bill to call for divestment from Iran as a way of ratcheting up the pressure to ensure that they don't obtain a nuclear weapon."
There he goes again.

How about his finely crafted speeches? Did he actually write all those on his own -- as did, say, Abraham Lincoln? No, though the mainstream media obscured (hid) this fact until after the election.

During the campaign, it was clear that he had plagiarized the speeches of his friend, Deval Patrick, Governor of Massachusetts. That revelation became widely-known. They shared a campaign strategist in David Axelrod. What worked for Patrick, worked for Obama. The same type of ringing phrases, the same cadences, the same ideas. They had passed the test and helped to elect Patrick. Market-proven and battle-tested.

But what is not as well-known is the provenance of his famous "race-speech" made in Philadelphia after revelations of the bigotry of his Pastor-Jeremiah Wright-became public. Obama's campaign for the Presidency was at risk. What to do? Well-give a speech, of course-because the media loved praising his speeches. In this notable case, they went into overdrive with over the top praise for the brilliance of Obama who -the story was-had written the speech himself. Except, of course, that he hadn't. He didn't write it: it was manufactured for him by his ghostwriter-speechwriter Jon Favreau (Kennedy had his Ted Sorensen; Obama has his Jon Favreau). We had to wait for this revelation until after Barack Obama assumed office.

James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal:

Remember Barack Obama's big race speech back in March, the one that invited comparisons to Lincoln? Neither does anyone else, but it seemed like a big deal at the time. On March 18 The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder did a short item called "Speechwriter of One" (quoting verbatim):

This wasn't a speech by committee... Obama wrote the speech himself, working on it for two days and nights.... and showed it to only a few of his top advisers.

This now appears to have been puffery, at least if the Washington Post has the story right:

One Saturday night in March, Obama called [Jon] Favreau and said he wanted to immediately deliver a speech about race. He dictated his unscripted thoughts to Favreau over the phone for 30 minutes--"It would have been a great speech right then," Favreau said--and then asked him to clean it up and write a draft. Favreau put it together, and Obama spent two nights retooling before delivering the address in Philadelphia the following Tuesday.

"So," Obama told Favreau afterward. "I think that worked."
Favreau is now the most highly paid of President Obama's staffers. A matter of fact, he earns as much as he can legally earn at the West Wing-hundreds of thousands of dollars every year . I suppose he is worth every one of our hard-earned dollars -- at least he is to Barack Obama.

So are we to treat his claim regarding his two books (The Audacity of Hope being the other) that he "actually wrote them myself" with some skepticism and the claim of Cashill with some credence?

A side effect of his sorry work habits is what he does when he cannot avoid having mistakes pinned on him. What does he do then? Jake Tapper of ABC News noted a very discreditable practice of Obama's: he scapegoats staffers as the ones to be blamed.

Is this the type of person anyone of us have ever enjoyed working with-let alone enjoy watching ascend the corporate ladder. Is this the type of person we want as President?

Has he continued this type of behavior as President?

Yes he has.

When his policies have come up a cropper he makes Cabinet and other leading officials fall on their swords so he can be shielded from owning up to his responsibility. . Lately, Greg Craig has taken the dive for Obama's Gitmo policy disaster. He was the latest fall guy.

The buck does not stop at Obama's desk. But we should have known that from his budget-busting deficits.

Is this why he dithers in the face of major geopolitical challenges? Is he afraid of making a mistake? Can he just vote present as President? Is this why he outsources so much domestic policy to Congress and foreign policy to the United Nations? Does he carry on his practice of voting present -- as he did as a state Senator -- while being President?

Does it seem he just doesn't like to do hard work?

Are all these habits just manifestations of a horrible ethic when it comes to work?

A friend of mine once criticized Barack Obama for not having an honest bone in his body. I responded that may be true -- but he sure does have plenty of lazy ones.

Ed Lasky is news editor of American Thinker.

 

[firespin]

Maybe you could give us a longer, more detailed post next time.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

You've had your say, now piss off McCaniac!





The Republicans, by not giving us a decent candidate to vote for allowed the liar to ascend to power where he currently basks in his own glory while McCain tries, once again, to pretend he's channeling Reagan...

 

[firespin]

You've had your say, now piss off McCaniac!





The Republicans, by not giving us a decent candidate to vote for allowed the liar to ascend to power where he currently basks in his own glory while McCain tries, once again, to pretend he's channeling Reagan...

Right, cause any Republican was going to be looking good with Dubya at 26% approval and everybody's IRA down 40% in two months.

I blame Hillary. Why didn't she go after Obama by noting that he hadn't done anything of significance in his whole career?

Oh, right. The whole pot / kettle thing. Sorry, I forgot.