(The definitive version of this post might be worth checking out.)
Part 1: The “Argument”
According to Jack Cashill—in an article first published at WorldNetDaily—Dreams from My Father was probably written by Bill Ayers. Cashill opens by demonstrating that Obama, unlike every undergraduate ever, published crap poems in a college literary journal. These crap poems “show not a glint of promise,” Cashill tells us, nor did a “heavily edited, unsigned student case comment” published in the Harvard Law Review. He then quotes an attorney consulted by Politico, who called it “a fairly standard example of the genre.” Cashill has a point here:
The “temperate legal language” of “a fairly standard example” of “a heavily edited, unsigned student case comment” is completely different from the style Obama would employ a few years later in his autobiography. Cashill is right to be suspicious. Who wouldn’t write their autobiography in the temperate language of an anonymous legal brief? What style is better suited to the tale of being abandoned by a father and raised to be a black man by a white woman in the wake of the Civil Right Movements?
None.
But Cashill isn’t content to let the matter rest on logic. He consults an expert—in this case, Patrick Juola of the Authorship Attribution Program—and is advised to continue doing “good old-fashioned literary detective work” of the sort that’s proven the plays of William Shakespeare were written by Roger Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, William Stanley, Walter Raleigh, Edmund Spenser, or Edward de Vere. Cashill is no ordinary literary detective: in the past he has been called upon to rescue celebrity biographies, so he recognizes when someone, in this case “[w]hoever rescued Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father[,] invest[s] considerable time to invent a distinct voice and style for an unknown author.” And who is this someone?
Bill Ayers.
How does Cashill know? Because the “distinct voice and style” Ayers invents for Obama “is surely Ayers’ [own].” Ayers invented a style—his own—then wrote Dreams from My Father in it. To the untrained eye, that may sound ridiculous; but as a Doctor of Philosophy of Literature, I assure you his “deconstruction” of Obama’s autobiography is sound and valid.
His technical argument begins by pointing out that both Obama’s Dreams from My Father and Ayers’ Fugitive Days “are obsessed with memory and its instability.” Both address this heretofore unheard topic in the history of autobiography in a very similar style. Compare this passage from Obama:
Identity is funny being yourself is funny as you are never yourself to yourself except as you remember yourself and then of course you do not believe yourself you do not really believe yourself why should you, you know so well so very well that it is not yourself.
To this one from Ayers:
Now it could not be yourself because you cannot remember right and if you do remember right it does not sound right and of course it does not sound right because it is not right. You are of course never yourself.
The obsession with the instability of memory should be evident even to those who have never ghost-written celebrity autobiographies. But Cashill’s deconstruction is far from complete. He amasses a boatload of irrefutable evidence:
- Both Obama and Ayers “use ‘storms’ and ‘horizons’ as metaphor and as reality.”
- “Ayers and Obama also speak often of waves and wind, Obama at least a dozen times on wind alone.”
- The polyamorous Ayers has “tangled love affairs” while the undergraduate Obama has “tangled arguments.”
- “On at least 12 occasions, Obama speaks of ‘despair,'” an emotion Ayers has been known to feel.
- “Obama . . . has a fondness for the word ‘murky’ and its aquatic usages.”
- Both . . . make conspicuous use of the word ‘flutter.'”
- The “Fugitive Days” excerpt scores a 54 on reading ease and a 12th grade reading level. The “Dreams'” excerpt scores a 54.8 on reading ease and a 12th grade reading level.
If Cashill’s math fails to convince you—54 is quite close to 54.8, but numbers might not be to your taste—consider that in his analysis, he “introduce[s his] own book, Sucker Punch . . . [a]s a control.” How much more scientific does his deconstruction need to be?
Part Two: The Stupid
At The Corner, Andy McCarthy evaluates Cashill’s argument and proves himself to be an idiot by finding Cashill’s “lengthy analysis . . . thorough, thoughtful, and alarming—particularly his deconstruction of the text in Obama’s memoir and comparison to the themes, sophistication and signature phraseology of Bill Ayers’ memoir.” To be blunt: if you find Cashill’s identification of “sea imagery” and his lists of words both Obama and Ayers use to be particularly anything other than laughable pablum, you’re an eighth-wit.
If, however, you only use Cashill’s juvenile musings as a hypothetical which, if true, suggests all the unsavory things you already believe about Obama, then you’ve fully embraced the Cashill Doctrine. What do I mean by that? If you deconstruct Cashill’s name, you’ll find that it contains the words “cash” and shill.” “Cash” refers to paper bank notes which, in more robust times, could be exchanged for goods or services. A “shill,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is “one who poses as a disinterested advocate of another but is actually of the latter’s party; a mouthpiece, a stooge.” It goes without saying that shills often shill for cash, but in this case, I think we can say the shill’s shilling for cash and attention.
Because no one with any literary training can read Cashill’s tripe without recognizing it as the shoddy work of a dim student asked to compare and contrast two texts.
53 comments
October 12, 2008 at 9:38 am
B Moe
First of all, Cashill isn’t as convinced Ayers wrote it as you portray him, I don’t think. He is fairly convinced it was ghost-written, and Ayers is his prime suspect. Personally, I think it would be someone more anonymous, more professional, and less egotistical than Ayers.
Here is a more fleshed out article by Cashill, from a more acceptable source than WND.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/10/who_wrote_dreams_from_my_fathe_1.html
Which includes this quote,
“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.
With advance in hand, Obama repaired to Chicago where he dithered. At one point, in order to finish without interruption, he and wife Michelle decamped to Bali. Obama was supposed to have finished the book within a year. Bali or not, advance or no, he could not. He was surely in way over his head.
According to a surprisingly harsh 2006 article by liberal publisher Peter Osnos, which detailed the “ruthlessness” of Obama’s literary ascent, Simon & Schuster canceled the contract. Dystel did not give up. She solicited Times Book, the division of Random House at which Osnos was publisher. He met with Obama, took his word that he could finish the book, and authorized a new advance of $40,000.
Then suddenly, somehow, the muse descended on Obama and transformed him from a struggling, unschooled amateur, with no paper trail beyond an unremarkable legal note and a poem about fig-stomping apes, into a literary superstar.”
That seems kind of hard for me to believe, how about you? You know how big publishing houses work? You think Simon & Shuster are going to just watch an investment like that spin down the drain?
October 12, 2008 at 9:50 am
SEK
I linked to that article too, B Moe, in the body of the text. (He’s written no fewer than four variations of it, full of self-plagiarism and minor amendations, at this point.)
I think it would be someone more anonymous, more professional, and less egotistical than Ayers.
But he claims Obama’s characteristic style was invented specifically for him by Ayers—and that he knows this because it matches Ayers’ own style and imagery. That argument’s not even circular, it’s just plain nonsense.
That seems kind of hard for me to believe, how about you? You know how big publishing houses work? You think Simon & Shuster are going to just watch an investment like that spin down the drain?
I do know how publishing houses work, and how individual agents within them do. As for not having a published record, we have no idea how Obama’s style evolved in the ten years between writing undergrad poetry and being offered the book deal. Do I believe someone can develop a style of thought and prose style without publishing? Certainly, I see it all the time. (Hell, I’m barely published, but I’m embarrassed by the clunkiness of what I have out there, because my style’s developed so much in the intervening years.)
What I didn’t get into in this post is that Cashill mentions the authors they both read and admired—Richard Wright, James Baldwin, &c.—and if anything, I’d say Obama sat himself down with a copy of Go Tell It On The Mountain and did his best Baldwin impersonation. The style’s are uncannily similar—but I’m not about to accuse Baldwin of having ghost-written Obama’s book. It’s a fairly obvious bit of literary genealogy of the sort even a marginally talented literary ghost-writer should’ve been able to suss out.
October 12, 2008 at 10:08 am
Colin
BM, you might look up sources before you retail this swill. Osnos
http://www.centuryinstitute.org/list.asp?type=NC&pubid=1425
is upset with Obama for switching agents. But he casts no aspersions on authorship nor mentions any surprise over speed of completion.
And right, no author EVAR has taken longer to finish a book than planned. First books especially.
October 12, 2008 at 10:19 am
md 20/400
His not meeting a deadline favors a ghostwriter doing the job?
Hands up everyone who didn’t get the dissertation done on the original timetable.
(My favorite moment in Tom Clancy’s novels was him having Jack Ryan get a PhD in History at Georgetown within a year and a half of enrollment.)
October 12, 2008 at 10:25 am
SEK
If you ignore the year on this post, you’ll see I pretty much made every deadline.
October 12, 2008 at 10:33 am
Josh Carrollhach
I still wonder about Ted Kaczynski ghosting Al Gore’s book. And really, what about Profiles in Courage? And how about that one-hit bitty Harper Lee and her famous friend Tru?
Jesus, how this new subsoil stinks of the hog pen. I want this election to be over. It’s bringing out the uglies.
October 12, 2008 at 11:02 am
tf smith
If “sea imagery” is enough to make the case, then every author from Mansfield to Forester and back again has been ghostwritten by Homer…
These people are lunatics.
October 12, 2008 at 12:01 pm
Jeremy Young
Yeah. And you know, Bill Ayers also ghost-wrote the Constitution.
October 12, 2008 at 12:37 pm
Ben Alpers
…from a more acceptable source than WND.
For some reason I feel the need to dot this particular “i”: American Thinker is not a more “acceptable” or reliable source than WND.
October 12, 2008 at 12:38 pm
Ben Alpers
By which I mean, they’re both repositories of wingnut ideology posing as “news” and/or “thought.”
October 12, 2008 at 1:37 pm
SEK
In all fairness, Ben, I don’t think I’ve ever seen Rapture-preparedness kits being hawked at American Thinker—but maybe I’m not looking hard enough.
October 12, 2008 at 2:12 pm
JPool
Wow, the post’s been up for at least four hours, and Rich has yet to show up to chide you for … something or other.
No, I can do this — Believing that your parody does anything more than give publicity and thus credence to wingnuts as individuals worth engaging with in any form other than blanket denunciation.
That was going to be it, right? Rich?
October 12, 2008 at 2:14 pm
Ben Alpers
Scott,
I didn’t say American Thinker and WND were identical. But you don’t need to be a Christianist to be a wingnut ideologue.
Among the “thought” currently accessible in one click from the front-page of The American Thinker (I’d link to these, but I don’t want to languish in moderation):
* An article questioning Obama’s citizenship status.
* An article asking why Obama’s ties to Communism aren’t getting more play (short answer: leftists control academia and the media).
* An article arguing that Obama is an “ally” of, among other people, Louis Farrakhan.
* Endless other articles touting Obama’s Marxist and leftist roots.
* In case you’re bored with All-Marxism-Obamism-All-the-Time, an article arguing that Israel better attack Iran now, which then pre-whines about how Israel will receive no credit for this great and necessary sacrifice for world peace.
In short, while The American Thinker is more secular than WND, it is no more acceptable from the standpoint of the reality-based community.
October 12, 2008 at 2:29 pm
SEK
Sorry about that Ben. Apparently I was being insufficiently visible with the irony there. No, one’s no more reputable than the other—in fact, I believe TAT‘s more dangerous, politically, than WND because of its thin veneer of non-insanity.
October 12, 2008 at 2:36 pm
Walt
Am I too sensitive, or is there a clear racial subtext to the article? A black man could never have done it himself, so the sinister white figure must be pulling the strings.
October 12, 2008 at 2:41 pm
SEK
I don’t think there is, Walt—in a couple of those articles he references Ayers’ kids being named after a Black Panther and Malcolm X, which allowed him to “get into Obama’s head” or somesuch. Then again, maybe this is a classic case of paternalism—as if the only person who could so eloquently express the dreams and fears of the black man is one of Mailer’s “white negroes.” Hard to tell. (Which is why I unconvinced myself in the course of a paragraph.)
October 12, 2008 at 2:45 pm
ben wolfson
Why Carpenter’s Gothic in particular?
October 12, 2008 at 2:46 pm
SEK
Because of the long passages in which the narrative’s related in legalese of the sort I imagine Obama used in his legal brief.
October 12, 2008 at 2:47 pm
kid bitzer
i don’t know what ‘reading ease’ and ‘grade level’ tests he was using, but on my copy of word, the spellchecker says that every damned article i proofread and edit–i work for several different journals–every damned one has a grade level of 12th grade.
prose by hundreds of authors. all the same grade level.
that’s because the scale does not go any higher than 12th grade.
and to get any lower than 12th grade, you have to avoid using any words with more than three syllables.
any educated prose in the english-speaking world–any author who has graduated from college, who is not intentionally writing ‘my pet goat.’ they’re all going to get the same damned score.
in an article full of stupid, this stands out as full of full-strength stupid.
October 12, 2008 at 2:49 pm
Satan wrote “John McCain’s” books… « Blurred Productions
[…] a comment » This is the most ridiculous thing in the history of ridiculous things. It is also a preview of the sort of things we can expect from […]
October 12, 2008 at 3:08 pm
ben wolfson
Oh. It’s been forever since I read it, I have to admit.
October 12, 2008 at 3:24 pm
urbino
Alright. Alright. I admit it. I wrote Obama’s book. And Ayers’. Baldwin’s, too.
Actually, I’m familiar with all literary traditions, having authored everything ever written.
October 12, 2008 at 3:28 pm
Long Post Today: Parties, Football, Gossip, Politics, Rallies, Etc. « blueollie
[…] An odd attack by wingnuts some claim that Obama didn’t write his first book! Really. These “claims” are analyzed here and here. […]
October 12, 2008 at 4:00 pm
Ben Alpers
Congrats, kid bitzer!
According to my MS Word, the readability level of your last comment was 8.9.
You’re learning to write for a broader audience!
October 12, 2008 at 4:44 pm
kid bitzer
yeah, pretty much.
when i comment on blogs, i’m trying for ‘my pet goat’.
October 12, 2008 at 5:33 pm
essear
urbino’s comment brings all sorts of new possibilities to mind. Maybe Ayers wrote Obama’s autobiography in the same way that Pierre Menard wrote Don Quijote.
October 12, 2008 at 5:48 pm
Rich Puchalsky
“Wow, the post’s been up for at least four hours, and Rich has yet to show up to chide you for … something or other.”
Jpool, the last time I chided Scott, I was spot on, as events proved. Maybe next you’d like to scold me for those horrible remarks about Bush I made back in 2000. Or for my uncivil opposition to the Iraq War before it started. Or any of the other times in which I was right.
But in predicting that I’d chide him for this, you only illustrated the probable reason why you prefer being polite and wrong to being right.
October 12, 2008 at 6:11 pm
Charlieford
One of the saner voices (a low bar, that) at NRO’s ‘Corner’ weighs in: “Even if Obama’s book was ghost-written — and I’ve seen no evidence that it was — fingering Ayers as the potential author is nutter-territory stuff.”
October 12, 2008 at 6:13 pm
Deter Mine
I read this post through an RSS feed without graphic style to influence me, and I really thought a couple of times that I was reading Michael Bérubé.
October 12, 2008 at 6:22 pm
SEK
JPool, the last time I chided Scott, I was spot on, as events proved.
Sadly, this is true. I have all these ideals, Rich shoots them down, then people, I don’t know, deliberately aim at his lower (my lowered) expectations. I prefer to believe Rich causes this than people are actually as he describes them, but I’m running out of evidence to support that.
I read this post through an RSS feed without graphic style to influence me, and I really thought a couple of times that I was reading Michael Bérubé.
And now I can die and go to blog heaven. Good night everyone, it’s been fun!
October 12, 2008 at 6:41 pm
JPool
I prefer being polite and right (I’m Canadian Minnesotan that way). In fact I don’t really see how they’re opposed choices. As I’ve said before, I don’t believe in civility in every and all circumstances, but I do believe in it as a default.
Actually, what I was chiding/mocking you for here doesn’t have much to do with politeness. It has to do with your apparent conviction that any engagement with the right other than blanket denunciation is at best tedious (specific denunciations apparently evince softness by opening the possibility of some unknown set of non-denouncible actions).
October 12, 2008 at 8:16 pm
Rich Puchalsky
You don’t even see how they are opposed choices? Talk about proving my point. The truth is uncivil, Jpool. For instance, the truth about the right is that they really are all scum. Your desire to have this not be true tells us something about what you want, but not anything about how they are actually going to behave. And it’s impossible to speak this truth civilly.
And your desire to have the truth be that way is ludicrous and harmful. It’s the same syndrome that has permitted aggressive war, torture, and all the other calamities of the Bush years — the “who cares whether the DFHs are right; they’re shrill” syndrome.
Lastly, you have no idea what my “apparent conviction”s are, even descriptively. And I see no point in trying to explain them. As other recent threads have shown, when people don’t want to understand something, all of a sudden they can no longer read.
October 12, 2008 at 8:21 pm
Ron Tunning
I might suggest that “Who Really Wrote The Bible” might be a more pertinent question given that it seems to be the primary guiding force shaping the ideology of the political right.
Although I’ve read and been impressed with “Dreams From My Father” and consider it a remarkable literary achievement for a politician, I daresay I haven’t been inclined to quote from it, nor to utilize it as a basis of support for my leftist ideas of governance.
Given that the “Bible” was allegedly ghost written by God through Divinely inspired terrestrial beings it seems somewhat disingenuous to raise as an important issue the authorship of “Dreams….”.
Perhaps one or more of the historical scholars who frequent this blog might be willing to undertake a careful examination of the “Bible” and identify once and for all a chapter by chapter, book by book list of contributing authors along with footnotes referencing supporting documentation.
October 12, 2008 at 8:27 pm
SEK
Ron, I agree with you, so don’t take this the wrong way—but that’s the absolute worst way to approach this. We start talking about Harold Bloom, redactors and what-not and we’re cooked. Obviously, as a Jew who knows Hebrew and has studied literature, I can recognize that the voice of Deuteronomy ain’t the same voice we read in Exodus . . . but that’s not a winning strategy pragmatically. (Believe you me, I know. Seems Jews don’t even want to think about how awesome it is that two’ve them could’ve cobbled together the foundation of Judeo-Christian culture.)
October 12, 2008 at 8:33 pm
Josh
And it’s impossible to speak this truth civilly.
Maybe for you.
October 12, 2008 at 8:47 pm
JPool
“And it’s impossible to speak this truth civilly.”
No, it’s not. Try this:
“You, sir/madam, are scum, because you have done/said x, y, z.”
See how civil that was? It makes a specific charge of scumitude based upon specific behaviors.
The right is a lot of people. For most of us, they appear among our coworkers, relatives, and perhaps even our friends. And while they are all wrong, morally and empirically, in many of their beliefs, they are, in fact, not all scum. It would be simpler if they were, but also more fundamentally hopeless.
In case it needs saying, I may not know what your convictions actually are (only being able to go on what you write), but I do not in fact hold any of the convictions that you ascribe to me.
Oh, and also in case Ari accuses me of falsely appropriating his heritage, the “Canadian” above was supposed to be struck out, but my html is for sucky.
October 12, 2008 at 8:54 pm
JPool
And also, it takes me a long time to write comments, and Josh is funnier than I am (tonight).
October 12, 2008 at 9:01 pm
Ahistoricality
Actually, Scott, I think the cobbled-together nature of the Pentateuch is the very foundation of our faith: without the repetition and self-contradiction in the text, the Rabbinic tradition would never have developed. And without the Talmudic attempts to make sense of the random, to create continuity out of coalition, there’s no literary analysis. You, my friend, are the intellectual descendant of Hillel (I, on the other hand, am the intellectual descendant of Shammai; present in the text but rarely cited or taken much note of).
FWIW, my spouse has read Audacity of Hope and just started reading Dream of my father (both by audiobook), and is quite sure that the same person — the same ‘voice’ — wrote both. My spouse was very, very amused when I related this ghostwriter theory.
October 12, 2008 at 10:05 pm
urbino
Perhaps one or more of the historical scholars who frequent this blog might be willing to undertake a careful examination of the “Bible” and identify once and for all a chapter by chapter, book by book list of contributing authors along with footnotes referencing supporting documentation.
I’ll save them some time: I wrote that, too. The different voices you detect are by-products of my varying alcohol intake.
October 12, 2008 at 11:02 pm
Ben Alpers
FWIW, my spouse has read Audacity of Hope and just started reading Dream of my father (both by audiobook), and is quite sure that the same person — the same ‘voice’ — wrote both.
So the Terrorist Ayres wrote Audacity of Hope, too?!?
Will these leftist muslimomexiafronationalistofascists stop at nothing?!?
October 13, 2008 at 12:16 am
Ahistoricality
So the Terrorist Ayres wrote Audacity of Hope, too?!?
That is one logical inference, yes.
Will these leftist muslimomexiafronationalistofascists stop at nothing?!?
Well, the rightist muslimomexiafronationalistofascists did it first!
October 13, 2008 at 5:09 am
Rich Puchalsky
“See how civil that was? It makes a specific charge […]”
Like I said, when people don’t want to understand, they become unable to read. What you’re describing is like having a society in which people keep trying to make full-sized buildings out of balsa wood. Whenever someone says “That’s not going to hold — it’s balsa wood” then they reply indignantly “But that isn’t fair to the wood! To be civil, we need to give this piece of wood a chance.” And only after the building collapses do they take out the individual stick of wood and say “For shame!” Then they build the next building using balsa wood again, because hey they have to give those other pieces of wood a chance.
People aren’t wood, of course, but being on the right is a choice. By making that choice, people have already shown what they are. Your coworkers, your relatives, and your friends are scum. And your desire to make yourself appear all fair and civil — to puff up your ego, essentially — is leading to one societal disaster after another.
October 13, 2008 at 5:24 am
kid bitzer
new post needed, on krugman’s nobel.
paul krugman is now the most thoroughly vindicated man in the world.
i always hate it when cassandras are vindicated. it means that all the appallingly bad shit they predicted has actually come down.
and in this case, it has. paul was shrill, but even he was not shrill enough to foresee how amazingly horrible the bush crime syndicate would be. even he could not foresee how much damage they would do.
but: he knew they were liars on a new scale of depravity, and he said they were liars, from the start.
he has been vindicated by a whole string of bush-wrought catastrophes. and now by the nobel committee. (though of course they are acknowledging his technical work, not his popular work).
and to think i knew him when!
October 13, 2008 at 8:34 am
ari
I met Krugman once. But I wasn’t able to touch the hem of his garment. I regret not having been pushier about that. Oh well.
October 13, 2008 at 9:41 am
I get letters
[…] for those who haven’t been keeping up, are in “response” to what SEK called — and the Atlantic linked — a post of mine on the theoretical ghostwriting by Bill […]
October 13, 2008 at 3:04 pm
SEK
I meant to address Ahistoricality’s post earlier, but it got lost in a kerfuffle:
You, my friend, are the intellectual descendant of Hillel
AM NOT! I have nothing to do with Hillel, as all it does it jam my inbox full of “OBAMA HATES ISRAEL” spam—wait, you mean historically. That, yes.
I’ve actually read both Obama books—if you’d like .pdf copies, all you need do is ask. (And not necessarily me. I asked someone who works for the campaign and they emailed me copies. I think they’re unofficial campaign literature at this point.) But your spouse is correct, but only sort of: the voice of the introduction to Dreams from My Father approximates that of The Audacity of Hope, but the voice of Dreams from My Father itself is far more Baldwinian, and in a good way. I mean, he’s no James Baldwin, but for paragraphs at a time, you can’t help but be impressed by his imitation.
October 14, 2008 at 7:28 pm
Noli Irritare Leones » Blog Archive » Definitive literary proof that Mary Queen of Scots ghost wrote Christopher Marlowe’s plays
[…] of the West has fun with Jack Cashill’s claim that Bill Ayers ghost wrote Obama’s autobiography Dreams From […]
October 15, 2008 at 9:25 am
Whither Wingnuttery? (Or: Can there be a decent Right?) « The Poor Man Institute
[…] through before we come to the key issue of salving partisan butthurt. And I have no doubt that the very same people who are working feverishly to prove that Wavy Gravy once changed the infant Oba… will soon be telling us that the Bush administration is “old news” and why would you […]
October 28, 2008 at 10:58 pm
Angus Fox
Late last week, I had an opportunity to review an early release of the statistical data that shows a strong correlation between the writings of William Ayres and the book Dreams from My Father. My immediate reaction was that Ayres had written or revised large sections of the book and completely bypassed other sections, which Obama probably wrote. The conclusions that one can reasonably draw from this new discovery–combined with existing knowledge of Obama’s past–are the following:
1. Obama absolutely cannot be trusted because he has lied about his relationship with Ayres;
2. No reasonable individual would allow another to write his memoirs unless both shared basic core beliefs;
3. Ayres is an avowed Marxist, and Obama is, at the very least, a closet Marxist;
4. Obama’s other associations indicate that he has gravitated to those with radical Marxist views (Wright, Fleger, Marshall);
5. When Obama talks about change we can believe in, he sounds very much like the Fidel Castro of 1958 (before he informed the world that he was a communist);
6. Given that the book Dreams from My Father propelled Obama to national attention, Obama is probably highly indebted to Ayres;
6. Thus, Obama is likely Ayres’ surrogate;
7. Heaven help the U.S. if that is the case.
October 28, 2008 at 11:08 pm
Vance
Donald Foster, is that you?
October 28, 2008 at 11:15 pm
urbino
Note also that when Angus Fox speaks of statistics without providing any data, and offers a series of numbered points, he sounds remarkably like the Soviet politburo. Fox is an avowed statistician, who are well known to be liars. No reasonable person would use a discipline so closely associated with lying unless that person also believed in lying. By his own admission, Fox is relied upon by others who believe in [lying] statistics, so it’s clear that such people gravitate to him and he to them; he is, at the very least, a closet liar. Given that Fox mentioned [lying] statistics in the post that brought him to prominence in the blogosphere, Fox is probably highly indebted to [lying] statistics.
Given that Fox is a lying Marxist statisticianist, heaven help . . . something or other.
October 28, 2008 at 11:17 pm
urbino
Sorry for the mistaken smear. I meant “Soviet,” not “Marxist.”
December 25, 2008 at 12:00 pm
The Soggy Biscuit, 2008 - Voting « The Poor Man Institute
[…] The Jingosphere, “Ayers ghost-wrote Obama’s book!“ […]