Bloodthirsty Liberal

Why is this dedicated to Chris Mathews? This is why

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.

So, read this, Chris. And along with Chris, we can skim it. But that is older research. People have had another year to study the matter and more material has come to light. The more advanced work is here

This is careful detective work, detail upon detail. The result is hundreds of similarities between the writing of Bill Ayers and Barack Obama. Some is simple and just odd:

Let me just cite a few matches between Ayers’ work and Dreams that I found intriguing. Rather astonishingly, as Mr. West points out, at least six of the characters in Dreams have the same names as characters in Ayers’ books: Malik, Freddy, Tim, Coretta, Marcus, and “the old man.” Many of the stories involving these characters in Dreams seem as contrived as their names.

Some of the tie-ins are built on mistakes appearing in both books: misquoting Carl Sandburg in exactly the same way, or misspelling the name Frantz Fanon (Ayers writes Franz, so does Obama).

Interestingly, Obama’s other book, The Audacity of Hope, was not written by Ayers. All the clever literary devices disappear.

Mr. West independently came to the same conclusion that I did, namely that Ayers was not meaningfully involved in Audacity. These two Obama books almost assuredly had different primary authors. What should be transparent to any literary critic is that the author of Audacity lacked the style and skill of the author of Dreams. There are a few pockets in Audacity that evoke the spirit of Dreams but without the same grace.

A likely suspect for these imitative passages, perhaps the whole of Audacity, is Obama’s young speechwriter, Jon Favreau. Favreau joined the Obama team in 2005, time enough to play that role. The London Guardian reports that Favreau carries Dreams wherever he goes and can “conjure up his master’s voice as if an accomplished impersonator.” If so, in Audacity he played the classic role of the ghostwriter — one who absorbs his client’s thoughts and relates them in a refined version of his client’s voice.

Bill Ayers was no one’s ghostwriter. The now overwhelming evidence strongly suggests that he used the frame of Obama’s life and finished it off with his own ideas, his own biases, his own experiences, his own passions, his own friends, even his own romances, all of this toned down just enough to keep Obama viable as a potential candidate.

I would argue that Ayers played Cyrano to Obama’s Christian. His personal history was too ugly for him to woo Roxane/America himself. But Obama — “articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” as Joe Biden reminded us — could and did make America’s heart melt.

I realize that this is more complex than the usual link plus quick explanation of topic that I usually post. To really understand the meat of this, you need to check out both links. On the other hand, you probably don’t have time in your life to do all that. The bottom line is that Obama quite possibly didn’t write Dreams of My Father and the true writer was Ayers. And, more importantly, the media is as incurious as ever when it comes to Barack Obama.

- Aggie

President Obama’s defenders will undoubtedly say: “He’s even more like Kennedy!”

“Obama had not as yet written anything. But he had taped interviews with family members. Andersen writes: ‘These oral histories, along with a partial manuscript and a truckload of notes, were given to Ayers.’ Look over those words. A man Obama said before the campaign — after conservative pundits continually raised the issue that he was friends with an ‘unrepentent terrorist’ — that he knew only in passing as someone in the neighborhood. He was simply an acquaintance — not someone he had any real friendship or relationship with. Yet Obama evidently gave Ayers his notes, tapes, and the small amount that he had already written…

Finally, Christopher Andersen concludes: ‘In the end, Ayers’s contribution to Barack’s Dreams From My Father would be significant — so much so that the book’s language, oddly specific references, literary devices, and themes would bear a jarring similarity to Ayers’s own writing.’…

Soon we’ll learn that the second volume of Obama’s memoirs should have been called The Intellectual Paucity of a Dope.

I’ve heard about the possible Ayers connection for months; I’m not sure this is anything new, even if it is more.

Before we hear from any Obamabots transcribing DNC talking points memos, let me make the case that it does matter. Obama is a media creation. Not just by the media, which is obvious and undeniable—but for the media.

How does a hack Illinois state senator with a radical but undistinguished past get all the way to the White House? Some of his former rivals (and current administration colleagues) give us a pretty good idea. One said he was “clean and articulate”; another said “he gave a speech”. That was enough to give Chris Matthews an erection, and I can only imagine what to Maureen Dowd.

An articulate black man! It hardly matters what he says, just that we can understand him saying it! Obama had only to come to the attention of the media, and they would do the rest. To spin gold out of the dross that was Obama’s life story was but a small hurdle. As Ted Sorenson was no longer in the ghost-writing business, they did the best they could. Tom Haden and Friedrich Engels turned down the project, so Ayers got the gig. He did well enough.

To all the lousy things I said about the Palestinians in the post below, please add: freeloading, bloodsucking leeches:

United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) Director of Operations in Jordan Richard Cook said today that the agency was reeling from extremely tough and unprecedented financial difficulties.

He told Petra in an interview that this year’s budget was estimated at $545 million dollars with a deficit of 30 million dollars, adding that the agency had not witnessed any worse financial situation in about 50 years.

…

“Refugees and the media should be aware of UNRWA’s difficult financial situation.

It’s a fact facing us and is beyond our control, particularly as financing is voluntary and not our annual right”, he said.

Voluntary? Not a right? Really? We could just turn off the spigot and be done with spewing half a trillion dollars into the desert sand every year?

Nonsense, of course. UNRWA, which exists solely to maintain Palestinians in a welfare state (the rest of the world has to make do with the UNHCR), has been in business for sixty years. It’s not going anywhere.

What Man can invite, He can uninvite:

The good guys win! Ayers is out! Because you spoke out, got on the phones and sent the emails, Boston College did the right thing and told unrepentant domestic terrorist Bill Ayers to take a hike.

Here’s how the Boston Herald reports it today:

Boston College yesterday abruptly withdrew two student groups’ invitation to former radical William Ayers to speak on campus Monday.

A BC spokesman said he was unaware of the plan for the controversial figure to speak on campus until contacted by the Herald yesterday afternoon. But students last night were scrambling to hold the speech off-campus.

“After meetings between administrators and students, the decision was made to rescind the invitation,” spokesman Jack Dunn said. Dunn declined to say why, adding only, “We feel the appropriate decision has been reached.”

The Herald’s coverage leaves unanswered the question as to whether the Boston College administration did the right thing and said “terrorists not welcome,” or the student groups who invited him–the AHANA Council and the College Democrats (JFK would be sound proud)–withdrew the invitation. Let’s hope it was both.

I am always troubled when a voice is denied the right to be heard—but not here. BC is a private institution, and a Catholic college. If pro-life means anything, then it surely means that unrepentant terrorists, with a local cop’s blood symbolically on their hands, are unwelcome.

“Guilty as sin and free as a bird,” Ayers once famously declared. Then go, and sin no more. Or at least sin somewhere else.

Credit to local radio talker, Michael Graham for this story:

Speaking soon at a Catholic college near you (or near me, anyway).

Terrorist William Ayers is speaking at Boston College this Monday, and nobody seems to care.

How ironic that Ayers’ likely route to BC will take him right through Brighton, where members of his Weather Underground murdered Officer Walter Schroeder of the BPD. It won’t bother Ayers. As he’s said repeatedly, he has no regrets over his terrorist past. In fact, he wishes he’d blown more stuff up.

In fact, Ayers and his fellow left-wing terrorists were only limited by their incompetence. While they tried to use nail bombs to murder American soldiers, they were actually much better at blowing themselves up than killing their innocent fellow citizens. But despite dopey arguments from local lefties to the contrary, Ayers group did manage to kill Officer Schroeder and three others, according to the FBI.

Jesus said “Blessed are the peacemakers.” Bill Ayers says “Blessed are the bomb makers.” At BC, that appears to be close enough.

Officer Shroeder had nine children. While he won’t be able to attend in person, perhaps one of Schroeder’s children who grew up without a father might make it over—Brighton borders right up against the BC campus.

They might look something like this:

Patrolman Schroeder was shot and killed while responding to a silent alarm at a bank at 9:20 am. The bank was being robbed by a gang of anti-Vietnam War activists. As he exited his cruiser and walked towards the bank a gang member who was across the street opened fire on him with a rifle, striking him in the back several times. Patrolman Schroeder was taken to a local hospital where he succumbed to his injuries.

The trigger man was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole, but has been denied parole each time. The other gang members were all sentenced to prison but are now mostly freed.

Patrolman Schroeder’s brother, Detective John Schroeder, was shot and killed while working for the same agency on November 30, 1973.

Patrolman Schroeder had been with the agency for 19 years and was survived by his wife and nine children.

Let another Boston reporter, Michelle McPhee, put that cowardly, despicable act in context:

On Sept. 23, 1970, BPD Officer Walter Schroeder was gunned down outside a Brighton bank that had just been robbed by five members of the Weather Underground. One of the terrorists opened fire on the cop. With bullets from a machine gun the group ripped off from a National Guard armory in Newburyport just weeks earlier, Schroeder was shot in the back and killed.

Schroeder left behind a wife and nine children, aged 17, 15, 13, 10, 9, 7, 6, 2 and 11 months. The gunman, William “Lefty” Gilday, was captured along with three accomplices. The armed getaway driver, Katherine Powers, fled and remained on the lam for 23 years. When she was finally caught, Powers was treated with the same despicable reverence that Obama’s friend Ayers has been given by the media. Like Ayers, Powers was profiled as a hapless revolutionary caught up in the tumult of the Vietnam War rather than what she truly is: a cop-killing lowlife.

That fact was not lost on Schroeder’s daughter, Clare, who delivered a powerful victim impact statement at Powers’ sentencing in 1993. “Powers’ crimes, her flight from justice and her decision to turn herself in have been romanticized utterly beyond belief,” Schroeder said. “My father’s life was cut short for no reason, shot in the back with a bullet of a coward while Ms. Powers waited to drive that coward to safety.” The Weather Underground was also involved in a Brinks robbery in Nyack, N.Y., that left two cops and a Brinks security guard dead. Those murders also left nine children fatherless.

So for Obama to think it is OK to launch his political career in the living room of two Weather Underground members, Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dohrn — the couple, like Powers, went underground as fugitives after a bomb-making factory blew up on a residential Manhattan block, killing three people — and then explain the association away by saying, “I was 8,” is outrageous.

Sorry, I just let that gratuitous Obama-bash slip in. Can’t imagine what I was thinking.

Anyway, I never expected the Jesuit fathers to warm to a domestic terrorist, beyond praying for his damned immortal soul. For which, I fear, it is too late.

To Canada.

Canada Refuses to Admit Bill Ayers: ‘If It Were Me I Would Have Let Me In’

Why is he trying to get into Canada when he should be in DC celebrating with his buddy? I’m surprised they didn’t have him on stage with Pete Seeger yesterday.

An American education professor, one of the founders of a radical 1960s group known as the Weather Underground, which was responsible for a number of bombings in the United States in the early 1970s, was turned back at the Canadian border last night.

Dr. William Ayers, a professor of education at the University of Illinois-Chicago and a leader in educational reform, was scheduled to speak at the Centre for Urban Schooling at University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. But that appearance has now been temporarily cancelled.

“I don’t know why I was turned back,” Ayers said in an interview this morning from Chicago. “I got off the plane like everyone else and I was asked to come over to the other side. The border guards reviewed some stuff and said I wasn’t going to be allowed into Canada. To me it seems quite bureaucratic and not at all interesting … If it were me I would have let me in. I couldn’t possibly be a threat to Canada.”

Ayers made headlines this summer after Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin suggested that then-Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama hung around with domestic terrorists like Ayers.

Heh.

- Aggie

By the way, why did the NY Times give Bill Ayers an op-ed? Didn’t they refuse one to John McCain during the election?

Katha Pollit of all people, tells Bill Ayers to put it where the sun don’t shine

It couldn’t have been easy for Bill Ayers to keep quiet while the McCain campaign tarred him as the Obama’s best friend, the terrorist. Unfortunately, the silence was too good to last. On Saturday’s New York Times op-ed page, he announced that “it’s finally time to tell my true story.” Like his memoir, Fugitive Days , “The Real Bill Ayers” is a sentimentalized, self-justifying whitewash of his role in the weirdo violent fringe of the 1960s-70s antiwar left.

“I never killed or injured anyone, “Ayers writes. “In 1970, I co-founded the Weather Underground, an organization that was created after an accidental explosion that claimed the lives of three of our comrades in Greenwich Village.” Right. Those people belonged to Weatherman, as did Ayers himself and Bernardine Dohrn, now his wife. Weatherman, Weather Underground, completely different! And never mind either that that “accidental explosion” was caused by the making of a nail bomb intended for a dance at Fort Dix.

I am just amazed that she is so tuned in to reality.

- Aggie

Now we know where Obama learned to kick his friends to the curb: from a master:

What a lying crapweasel. Asked about the dedication to RFK assassin Sirhan Sirhan and other “political prisoners” in the Weather Underground’s “Prairie Fire” manifesto (first unearthed by investigative Internet journalist Zombie), Bill Ayers denies that it’s true — then goes on to express his “regret” for singling out the killer.

He concludes by asserting that he would dedicate the book today to millions of “political prisoners” currently behind bars.

Harriet Tubman from the grave:

“Don’t you put my name next to Sirhan Sirhan’s. What did I ever do to you?”

It would appear the last person in Chicago with any intestinal fortitude was Michael Jordan.

On the plus side (and I’m a plus kind of guy), Billl Ayres is telling the truth now:

“We had served together on the board of a foundation, knew one another as neighbors and family friends, held an initial fund-raiser at my house, where I’d made a small donation to his earliest political campaign.”

On the negative side (hey even a plus guy has to keep it real), he’s still lying:

“We never committed terror,” he assures us, noting that (a) the Weathermen didn’t kill anyone, which is true if you exclude the occasional cop or two (a point Chris Cuomo doesn’t raise) and (b) even though what they did “was definitely over lots of lines,” it doesn’t really qualify as terror because the war simply had to be stopped and they were acting to that end.

But at least he’s on board with capitalism now:

Weather Underground bomber Bill Ayers is a busy bee.

The violence-embracing Marxist is on the lecture and media circuit, hawking his repackaged memoir, promoting a new book on race, and basking in all the post-Obama victory attention.

…

“The late Irving Howe once said that Tom Hayden ‘gave opportunism a bad name’ I would revise that estimate, and give that award to Ayers.”

Forget the Molotov cocktail, lovey, make mine an Absolut martini, bone dry, with two olives.

Yesterday, we noted that the once loud and loquacious among Barack Obama’s clerical entourage had lost their voices—only to magically rediscover them after the election!

Today, that cure has spread to Bill Ayers. Yes, Barack truly is the Messiah:

Whew! What was all that mess? I’m still in a daze, sorting it all out, decompressing.

For the past few years, I have gone about my business, hanging out with my kids and, now, my grandchildren, taking care of our elders (they moved in as the kids moved out), going to work, teaching and writing. And every day, I participate in the never-ending effort to build a powerful and irresistible movement for peace and social justice.

Where do you find the time, Bill? And you didn’t even mention the bane of my existence: laundry. Or does Bernardine take care of that?

During the primaries, the blogosphere was full of chatter about my relationship with Barack Obama. We had served together on the board of the Woods Foundation and knew one another as neighbours in Chicago’s Hyde Park. In 1996, at a coffee gathering that my wife, Bernardine Dohrn (also a founder of the Weatherman) and I held for him, I made a $200 donation to his campaign for the Illinois state senate.

That, right there, in six lines, is more coverage than the media provided in six months.

But Bill suffered so for his association with His Oneness—as too often happens to disciples of a messiah. Threats of torture and death—and that’s just from Dick Cheney!—and more hatred than any one man not named George W. Bush should ever have to endure.

But that which does not kill him makes him stronger:

In a robust and sophisticated democracy, political leaders – and all of us – ought to seek ways to talk with many people who hold dissenting, or even radical, ideas. Lacking that simple and yet essential capacity to question authority, we might still be burning witches and enslaving our fellow human beings today.

Maybe we could welcome our current situation – torn by another illegal war, as it was in the ’60s – as an opportunity to search for the new.

Perhaps we might think of ourselves not as passive consumers of politics, but as fully mobilized political actors.

Perhaps we might think of our various efforts now, as we did then, as more than a single campaign, but rather as our movement-in-the-making.

We might find hope in the growth of opposition to war and occupation worldwide.

Or we might be inspired by the growing movements for reparations and prison abolition, or the rising immigrant rights movement and the stirrings of working people everywhere, or by gay and lesbian and transgender people courageously pressing for full recognition.

Transgendered immigrant prisoners of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your gold-plated chains!

What do we want? Wiccan rights! When do we want ‘em? 1692!

Yet hope – my hope, our hope – resides in a simple self-evident truth: the future is unknown, and it is also entirely unknowable.

…

In this time of new beginnings and rising expectations, it is even more urgent that we figure out how to become the people we have been waiting to be.

Now whom does that sound like? I know I’m pretty cynical, but it sounds to me like the Weatherman-in-Chief is out to prove those rumors true that he’s the ghost writer of Obama’s life story. And why shouldn’t he? Royalty checks are thin and shallow compared to universal adulation.