© Jack Cashill

WorldNetDaily.com
September 20, 2008 

Note: This is Part 3 of Cashill's 3-part series. Click here for Part1, and here for Part 2.

On several occasions I have gotten calls from publishers to rescue a book, almost always one written by a celebrity. They have a vested interest in seeing that the book come out on time and in good style, especially if it is a projected bestseller.

My job is to match the voice of the author, capture their content, and refine their style.

Whoever rescued Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father went much further. He invested considerable time to invent a distinctive voice and style for an unknown author. In essence, he created the “Barack Obama” we know and did so for reasons that defy any marketing imperative

Obama, who had nothing in print until Dreams save for some awful undergraduate poetry, could no more write a book like this than I could paint the Mona Lisa. He has done nothing since, either spoken or written, to even hint at the eloquence of the memoir’s authorial voice.

Lacking digitized, full text versions of Dreams or Bill Ayers’ Fugitive Days, I have been reduced to close readings and yellow highlighters.

That much said, a textual comparison of the two books and the additional circumstantial evidence of time, place, means, and motive make Ayers a highly likely candidate for Obama’s ghostwriter.

This is troubling for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the character of Bill Ayers, the radical leftist who has made “unrepentant” a household word.

For Ayers, like so many on the left, hard and soft, facts are whatever he can get away with. “He was not interested in finding the truth but in proclaiming it,” British historian Paul Johnson says of Karl Marx, but he might as well have been talking about Ayers.

In perfectly pitched post-modern patois, Ayers admits as much. “The truth we know now,” he tells the reader, “is always complicated, layered, evasive, perspectival.”

“The old gods failed and the old truths left the world,” Ayers insists. “Clear conclusions,” he elaborates, “were mainly delusional, a luxury of religious fanatics and fools.”

Having declared truth obsolete, Ayers permits himself to lie, often and outrageously. To justify his bombing of the Pentagon, for instance, Ayers tells the reader that a century earlier abolitionist John Brown had “shot all the members of the grand jury,” which is easily disproved nonsense.

Ayers is particularly reckless with numbers. In the “rotten and unjustifiable” Vietnam War, he tells us, America was responsible for the “indiscriminate murder of millions of Vietnamese.”

Our sanctions against Iraq killed “500,000 Iraqi children.” The Clinton-era missile strike on a Sudanese chemical factory “caused tens of thousands of deaths.”

Demographics don’t stand in the way of a good story. During the American bombing along the Cambodian-Vietnamese border, he insists, “perhaps three-quarters of a million peasants were murdered cleanly from the air.”

This figure represents many more people than lived in the area that was bombed and more than 10 percent of the Cambodian population. In reality, fewer than 750,000 Cambodians died violently during that whole era from all causes, most in the civil war raging throughout the country.

The killing began in earnest only in 1975 after the bombing had stopped and the communists took over. In fact, Pol Pot is the only communist Ayers criticizes, but, of course, he blames his rise on America.

Not an ill word is said about the demonstrably murderous thugs Ayers holds up as heroes: Castro, Che, Ho Chi Minh, or even Mao, the greatest monster of the 20 th century.

As to the three clowns who blew themselves up in 1970 in their Greenwich Village townhouse, Ayers wonders out loud how it will take before America “imagines their actions as heroic.”

For the record, the three Weathermen, including Ayers’ then girlfriend Diana Oughton, were finishing up an anti-personnel bomb designed to kills non-coms and their dates at a dance that night at Fort Dix.

Ayers, by the way, is a “Distinguished Professor” in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He teaches our teachers how to teach our children.

That Obama had anything to do with this man should disqualify him for the presidency. At the end of the day, the only difference between Bill Ayers and Tim McVeigh is competence.

Obama dissembles lethally when he describes Ayers as “just some guy in my neighborhood.” He is much more than that and quite possibly, as I have argued, the real author of Dreams From My Father.

The publisher of Dreams, the openly liberal Peter Osnos, tells how Obama dumped his devoted long time agent after Dreams took off and then signed a seven-figure deal with Crown, using only a by-the-hour attorney.

Obama pulled off the deal after his election but before being sworn in as Senator, this way to avoid the disclosure and reporting requirements applicable to members of Congress.

To his credit, Osnos publicly scolds Obama for his “ruthlessness” and “his questionable judgment about using public service as a personal payday.”

Our best hope, if Obama is elected, is that he will throw Ayers under the proverbial bus as he threw his agents and numerous others.

Our worst fear, however, is that a President Obama will prove to be the “Mansourian Candidate” and that he will continue to play the useful dummy to evil ventriloquists like Bill Ayers and Khalid Al-Mansour.

Fasten your seatbelts.

Previous columns in this series:

• Part 1: Did Bill Ayers write Obama's "Dreams"?
• Part 2: Did Bill Ayers write Obama's "Dreams"?
  Deconstructing the Text