Bill Ayers wrote "Dreams From My Father"

I was once impressed with Barack Obama as a public speaker.  Then I figured out that he had memorized a few dozen stock paragraphs that he used over and over and over with different nouns in strategic places. 

I was once impressed with Barack Obama as a writer.  Then I figured out, after a few months of listening to his speeches, that he just might...not....be....capable of stringing coherent thoughts together. 

Exhibit A in this is "Dreams From My Father", his autobiography.  It really is a pretty good book.  But it doesn't sound like Barack Obama.  It doesn't even sound like Barack Obama talking to a ghostwriter.  I mean, if I were to secretly turn this blog over to some other typist for a couple of week's, my 15 regular readers would notice something different, right? 

Back in October of '09, I laboriously typed a couple of pages from "Barack And Michelle - Portrait Of An American Marriage" into this site and got a few jillion hits.  No one else had put it out there.  This section is about the writing of "Dreams From My Father", and Bill Ayers, the former terrorist that Obama claims he only knew from a couple of fundraisers:

******************

"Desperate to finish the book, Barack and Michelle took a leave of absence from their jobs and decamped to the Indonesian island of Bali so that, as his sister Maya put it, he could “find a peaceful sanctuary, where there were no phones, to work on the book.” When he returned in early 1994, Barack burrowed even deeper into the Hole (the office behind the Obama kitchen) in a last-gasp effort to finish it.

Two months later, with a September 1994 deadline looming, Barack was still stymied. It was around this time that, at Michelle’s urging, he sought advice from his friend and Hyde Park neighbor, Bill Ayers. Michelle had known Ayers’s wife, Bernadine Dohrn, at Sidley Austin, where Dohrn worked as a paralegal between 1984 and 1988. Dohrn’s father-in-law, former Commonwealth Edison CEO Thomas Ayers, just happened to be one of the firm’s most important clients."

"Barack got to know Bill Ayers’s father and his brother, John, when all three served on the Leadership Council of the Chicago Public Education Fun. Ajnother mutual friend of Ayers and Barack was Jean Rudd, whose nonprofit Woods Fund had provided Jerry Kellman with the money he needed to hire Barack as an organizer back in 1985.

Neither Michelle nor Barack seemed particularly troubled to discover that William Ayers and Bernadine Dorhn had been two of the 1960s’ most infamous radicals – leaders of the Weather Underground terrorist group that set off thirty bombs in the 1960s and 1970s.

After an explosion in the Weathermen’s Greenwich Village bomb-making laboratory killed three of their fellow Weathermen (including Ayers’s girlfriend at the time, Diana Oughton) and virtually destroyed the neighboring town house owned by Dustin Hoffman, Ayers and Dohrn went underground. In 1973 charges against them were dismissed due to prosecutorial misconduct, but Dohrn remained a fugitive until she finally turned herself in to police in 1980.

Ayers made no apologies for his terrorist past, and in the 1990’s still described himself as “a radical, Leftist, small ‘c’ communist….The ethics of communism still appeal to me. I don’t like Lenin as much as the early Marx.”

I love that phrase. "The ethics of communism". Communism killed somewhere between 60 and 100 million people. They made the Nazis look like amateurs. But their intentions were so good and wholesome.

Ayers’s radical past didn’t seem to bother Chicago’s civic leaders, many of whom worked with him on education reform. He worked particularly closely with Mayor Richard M. Daley on reshaping the city’s school programs – an effort that also brought him into contact with one of Daley’s assistants at the time, Michelle Obama.

What did interest Barack were Ayers’s proven abilities as a writer. Unlike Barack, Ayers had written and cowritten scores of articles and treatises, as well as several nonfiction books beginning with Education: An American Problem in 1968. But it was the tone Ayers had set in his latest book – To Teach (1993) – that Barack hoped to emulate.

The tale of a maverick teacher who takes her students onto the streets of New York to teach them firsthand about history, culture, and survival, To Teach was written in a fluid, novelistic style. Barack asked for Ayers’s input, and Ayers, who like so many in his circle was greatly impressed by the charismatic young activist, obliged.

To flesh out his family history, Barack had also taped interviews with Toot, Gramps, Ann, Maya, and his Kenyan relatives. These oral histories, along with his partial manuscript and a trunkload of notes, were given to Ayers. “Everyone knew they were friends and that they worked on various projects together,” another Hyde Park neighbor pointed out. “It was no secret. Why would it be? People liked them both.”

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 writings. Even the caveat at the beginning of Dreams, in which Barack points out that he uses invented dialogue, embellished facts, composite characters, inaccurate chronology, and pseudonyms to create an “approximation” of reality, resembles Ayers’s defense of the inaccuracies in his memoir Fugitive Days. In the foreward to his book, Ayers states that the book is merely a collection of his personal memories and “impressions.”

“There was a good deal of literary back-scratching going on in Hyde Park,” said writer Jack Cashill, who noted that a mutual friend of Barack and Ayers, Rashid Khalidi, thanked Ayers for helping him with his book Resurrecting Empire. Ayers, explained Cashill, “provided an informal editing service for like-minded friends in the neighborhood.”

Certainly none of these authors hesitated to acknowledge their admiration for one another at the time. In his 1997 book, A Kind And Just Parent, Ayers would cite the “writer” Barack Obama (along with Muhammad Ali and Louis Farrakhan) as one of the celebrities living in his neighborhood. In turn, Barack would write a glowing review of that same book for the Chicago Tribune, and Michelle would host a panel discussion on the book at the University of Chicago, with Ayers and her husband as the principal speakers.

Thanks to help from the veteran writer Ayers, Barack would be able to submit a manuscript to his editors at Times Books. With some minor cuts and polishing, the book would be on track for publication in the early summer of 1995. In the meantime, he began showing the rough draft to a chosen few relatives.

*************

So what of it? 
Well, The Teleprompter Jesus was elected on the strength of his "writing".  He claimed that he didn't know Ayers that well, Ayers was just a guy in the neighborhood. 
 
And finally
 

Last Thursday evening at Montclair State University, with a video camera rolling, Bill Ayers volunteered that yes indeed he had written the acclaimed Barack Obama memoir, Dreams from My Father.

Unprompted, Ayers also noted that while Dreams deserves its praise, Obama's second opus, Audacity of Hope, is "more of a political hack book."

Not surprisingly, Ayers retreated into irony as he ended the session. "Yeah, yeah," he said after confirming again that he wrote Dreams, "And if you help me prove it, I'll split the royalties with you. Thank you very much."
With his final comment, the Ayers-friendly audience laughed in relief. The media will laugh nervously upon seeing the video as well. The White House will not.
Barack Obama knows what I know and what the people who have read my book, "Deconstructing Obama," know: Bill Ayers is the principal craftsman behind Dreams. The evidence is overwhelming.

Ayers also established, as I have contended from the beginning, that he is not the author of Audacity of Hope. Although Obama claims unique authorship of this book too, it was, as Ayers suggests, a disingenuous feint to the center written by committee.

Worse for Obama still, Ayers knows that the story he and Obama contrived in Dreams is false in many key details. The fact that Donald Trump has proved willing to challenge that story has got to make the White House even more apprehensive.

As was obvious in his speech at Montclair, Ayers does not like the application of force in Libya, and this may have been his own way of retaliating. Consider it a shot across Obama's bow. The White House will.

Here's yer video. 



And here's a video of our current Secretary Of State, trying to nail Obama on the lie:




The country is in the best of hands. 
I mean, if a bunch of radical Marxists really found a way to take over a country in order to destroy its economy, involve it worldwide conflicts, ruin its healthcare system, and plunge it into horrific debt so they could implement a system more to their liking afterwards, could they do better than this? 

Barack Obama, William Ayers, "Dreams Of My Father", and ghostwriters

During the unpleasantness of last November, there was considerable debate about Barack Obama's relationship with former Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers.
Obama described him as "a guy who lives in my neighborhood".

Mr. Obama didn't mention that William Ayers helped write the Obama memoir, Dreams Of My Father.

The following is from “Barack And Michelle – Portrait Of An American Marriage”, by Christopher Andersen. 2009, William Morrow Publishing.
Perhaps Andersen made all this up. Perhaps William Morrow's fact-checking department fell down on the job.
But if it's true, it would explain a lot about the direction of the last 9 months, wouldn't it? If someone wanted to destroy capitalism and the free market, could anyone improve on what we're now going through?
Indulge me here....
Here's the complete controversial text, from "Barack and Michelle" by Christopher Andersen, pages 164-166.

"Desperate to finish the book, Barack and Michelle took a leave of absence from their jobs and decamped to the Indonesian island of Bali so that, as his sister Maya put it, he could “find a peaceful sanctuary, where there were no phones, to work on the book.” When he returned in early 1994, Barack burrowed even deeper into the Hole (the office behind the Obama kitchen) in a last-gasp effort to finish it.
Two months later, with a September 1994 deadline looming, Barack was still stymied. It was around this time that, at Michelle’s urging, he sought advice from his friend and Hyde Park neighbor, Bill Ayers. Michelle had known Ayers’s wife, Bernadine Dohrn, at Sidley Austin, where Dohrn worked as a paralegal between 1984 and 1988. Dohrn’s father-in-law, former Commonwealth Edison CEO Thomas Ayers, just happened to be one of the firm’s most important clients."

One brief interruption. Like Fidel Castro, and like Che Guevara, Bill Ayers grew up very well-off, but wanted to rebel against the only system proven to make people well-off. Bill Ayers' father ran Commonwealth Edison. Sheesh.

"Barack got to know Bill Ayers’s father and his brother, John, when all three served on the Leadership Council of the Chicago Public Education Fun. Ajnother mutual friend of Ayers and Barack was Jean Rudd, whose nonprofit Woods Fund had provided Jerry Kellman with the money he needed to hire Barack as an organizer back in 1985.
Neither Michelle nor Barack seemed particularly troubled to discover that William Ayers and Bernadine Dorhn had been two of the 1960s’ most infamous radicals – leaders of the Weather Underground terrorist group that set off thirty bombs in the 1960s and 1970s.

After an explosion in the Weathermen’s Greenwich Village bomb-making laboratory killed three of their fellow Weathermen (including Ayers’s girlfriend at the time, Diana Oughton) and virtually destroyed the neighboring town house owned by Dustin Hoffman, Ayers and Dohrn went underground. In 1973 charges against them were dismissed due to prosecutorial misconduct, but Dohrn remained a fugitive until she finally turned herself in to police in 1980.
Ayers made no apologies for his terrorist past, and in the 1990’s still described himself as “a radical, Leftist, small ‘c’ communist….The ethics of communism still appeal to me. I don’t like Lenin as much as the early Marx.”

I love that phrase. "The ethics of communism". Communism killed somewhere between 60 and 100 million people. They made the Nazis look like amateurs. But their intentions were so good and wholesome.

Ayers’s radical past didn’t seem to bother Chicago’s civic leaders, many of whom worked with him on education reform. He worked particularly closely with Mayor Richard M. Daley on reshaping the city’s school programs – an effort that also brought him into contact with one of Daley’s assistants at the time, Michelle Obama.
What did interest Barack were Ayers’s proven abilities as a writer. Unlike Barack, Ayers had written and cowritten scores of articles and treatises, as well as several nonfiction books beginning with Education: An American Problem in 1968. But it was the tone Ayers had set in his latest book – To Teach (1993) – that Barack hoped to emulate.
The tale of a maverick teacher who takes her students onto the streets of New York to teach them firsthand about history, culture, and survival, To Teach was written in a fluid, novelistic style. Barack asked for Ayers’s input, and Ayers, who like so many in his circle was greatly impressed by the charismatic young activist, obliged.
To flesh out his family history, Barack had also taped interviews with Toot, Gramps, Ann, Maya, and his Kenyan relatives. These oral histories, along with his partial manuscript and a trunkload of notes, were given to Ayers. “Everyone knew they were friends and that they worked on various projects together,” another Hyde Park neighbor pointed out. “It was no secret. Why would it be? People liked them both.”

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 writings. Even the caveat at the beginning of Dreams, in which Barack points out that he uses invented dialogue, embellished facts, composite characters, inaccurate chronology, and pseudonyms to create an “approximation” of reality, resembles Ayers’s defense of the inaccuracies in his memoir Fugitive Days. In the foreward to his book, Ayers states that the book is merely a collection of his personal memories and “impressions.”

In other words, don't bother fact-checking either book. Like the other products produced by these two, the books are bullshit.

“There was a good deal of literary back-scratching going on in Hyde Park,” said writer Jack Cashill, who noted that a mutual friend of Barack and Ayers, Rashid Khalidi, thanked Ayers for helping him with his book Resurrecting Empire. Ayers, explained Cashill, “provided an informal editing service for like-minded friends in the neighborhood.”
Certainly none of these authors hesitated to acknowledge their admiration for one another at the time. In his 1997 book, A Kind And Just Parent, Ayers would cite the “writer” Barack Obama (along with Muhammad Ali and Louis Farrakhan) as one of the celebrities living in his neighborhood. In turn, Barack would write a glowing review of that same book for the Chicago Tribune, and Michelle would host a panel discussion on the book at the University of Chicago, with Ayers and her husband as the principal speakers.
Thanks to help from the veteran writer Ayers, Barack would be able to submit a manuscript to his editors at Times Books. With some minor cuts and polishing, the book would be on track for publication in the early summer of 1995. In the meantime, he began showing the rough draft to a chosen few relatives.

From the dust jacket of "Barack and Michelle": Christopher Andersen is the critically acclaimed author of twenty-eight books, which have been translated into more than twenty-five languages worldwide. A former contributing editor of Time magazine and senior editor of People magazine, Andersen has also written hundreds of articles for a wide range of publications, including Life magazine, the New York Times, and Vanity Fair.

The End Of Chicken Stacking In California

My Aggie daughter came home from College Station this past weekend, and she was outraged.

Unlike most large packs of academics, the A&M tribe seems to be somewhere off to the right of Barry Goldwater.

(A friend of mine sent me a press release today about A&M's Young Conservatives losing their faculty advisor....He was rumored to have an Obama sign in his yard. In the same link, check out the Young Conservatives' response to the "demonization" of the despicable William Ayers. The demonization of William Ayers, in my opinion, is like the demonization of Timothy McVeigh....just because the bastard failed to kill a couple of hundred people doesn't get him off the hook.)

Anyway, back to my point.... My Aggie's Animal Science professor had gotten the students worked up over California voters passing Proposition 2, a ballot initiative that regulates the minimum amount of space in which farm animals can be confined.

(Proposition 2 shouldn't be confused with Proposition 8. Proposition 8 is the California ballot initiative that regulates the type of marriage arrangements within which two people can be confined.)

Some obvious abuses have already been identified and partially eliminated in the cattle, swine, and of course the infamous veal calf industry. But my little Aggie was still angry, saying that the government had gone too far this time. She was under the impression that stackable A-frame chicken cages would be slowly outlawed in the course of a 5-year phase out.

Well, dang it, any professor who works Anti-Big Government rants into his VooDoo Arts Of Animal Healing lectures should have my full support. (She was bothered enough about it to demand that I go online and write something about governmental over-reach in California's stackable chicken industry.)

This is a PDF of the request for a ballot proposal.

Here's the Oakland Tribune.

Here's the L.A. Times.

Here's the San Francisco Chronicle.

And here's the always helpful Wikipedia, which claims that actress Alicia Silverstone supported the proposition. The L.A. Times and the San Francisco Chronicle opposed it. Alicia Silverstone, star of "Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed", prevailed in the voting.

Here's what the thing amounted to: Cattle were lumped into the same category as poulty, mostly for emotional reasons. (Voters don't give a rip about chickens.) But California doesn't have a significant Cattle industry. California, until election day, had a huge poultry/egg industry.

The passage of Proposition 2 basically ends the industry in that state. California's Chicken Stackers are going to relocate elsewhere in the next 5 years.

(I've tried for two minutes to think of a closing sentence with the phrase "flew the coop", but I've failed. Be grateful.)

William Ayers Demotivational Poster

The Daddy Party (R) is FINALLY hitting back at The Mommy Party (D) over Barack Obama's relationship with William Ayers.
The bulk of Obama's executive experience was with Bill Ayers, a former member of The Weather Underground.
I posted and linked and wailed about this guy back in August. Click here and here if you're interested. The stuff on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge is still under lock and key, and probably will stay that way until after November.
Nobody cared back in August, but the puppetmasters have now declared that Ayers is a legitimate concern.

William Ayers and Barack Obama and 132 boxes at The University of Illinois at Chicago

Former terrorist William Ayers is finally getting some attention from The Daddy Party (also known as The Republicans).


I wondered at great length in a previous post about when this was going to happen. (Actually, I've been wondering if a Republican campaign against Barack Obama would ever happen....) Here's some analysis of the video from a great site called "The Campaign Diaries", a site that's worth bookmarking if you're a political junkie.

The ad’s goal could not be more explicit, and this is the clearest attempt yet to define Obama as a Manchurian Candidate. It strokes voters’ perception of Obama as a mystery that is simply too dangerous to go for, a mystery so huge that Obama could in fact be an anarchist terrorist looking to get in power to bomb to destroy the Capitol. (The moderators of the ABC debate in April had already raised the Ayers connection.) The Washington Post fact-checking division provides some details as to the Obama-Ayers relationship, which it describes as a “tenuous” one.

As of today, I wouldn't trust the Washington Post's fact-checking department to review the orders at the McDonald's drive-through in Yazoo City, Mississippi. Their bias in favor of The Mommy Party (also known as the Democrats) has been established for a while, and then we get to this, an editorial is by John Kass, writing for the Chicago Tribune, about the adventures of journalist Stanley Kurtz and his efforts to review various documents related to the "tenuous" Obama/Ayers relationship:

When Daley says shhh, library is quiet on Obama
John Kass

....Kurtz's research was to be done in a special library run by the University of Illinois at Chicago. The library has 132 boxes full of documents pertaining to the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a foundation vested heavily in school reform. Kurtz believes the documents may show Obama and Ayers were close—far closer than Obama has acknowledged—over oodles of foundation gifts on education projects the two worked on together.

First the librarians told Kurtz yes, come look.

But by the time Kurtz landed in Chicago, the librarians changed their minds. The donor of the documents hadn't cleared his research.

Perhaps they'll let him look at the documents on Nov. 5.

The relationship between the ambitious Obama and the unrepentant Ayers is a subject that excites Republicans, who haven't really thwacked that pinata as hard as they might.

It really irritates Obama and his political champion, Chicago's sovereign lord, Mayor Richard M. Daley. "This is a public entity," Kurtz told us Wednesday. "I don't understand how confidentiality of the donor would be an issue."

Kass goes on to explain that if Mayor Daley doesn't want the review of the documents to happen, it ain't gonna happen.

But wouldn't it be fun to go through those boxes?

Here's the Kurtz article on his difficulties with gaining acces to The Ayers Archive. For the sake of future generations with time of their hands, I'm also copying the entire piece here.

Barack Obama and William Ayers

There have been a lot of posts the last few days about William Ayers and The Weather Underground.

The Weather Underground took their name from the lyrics of Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues": You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. They were an early 1970's radical group that ran around plotting to blow up things they didn't like - The Pentagon, Nation Guard Armories, their parents, etc etc etc.

The group could have used a safety consultant, as three members accidentally blew up themselves in a Greenwich Village safe house.

Chicago magazine once published an excellent profile on Ayers. The funniest part is how the guy rants against globalization, but saw no problem with supporting Starbucks. I believe that he'd never thought about the contradictions until this interview:

What are you doing in a Starbucks? I ask the man who professes to hate globalization.
"Oh," he says. "I have an addiction to caffeine."

There you have the complexity of Ayers: a man who once tried to overthrow his country's government and now works for a state university; an opponent of the bourgeoisie who has been married for 20 years; a left-wing radical who loves a good cup of imperialist coffee. Maybe he's always known how to choose his battles. Once one of his sons wanted to hear about how Ayers had been a draft card burner. "Tell me again how you burned your credit card, Pop," his son confusedly asked.

Here's a video that gives you something to contrast with the frumpy academic in that interview:


Here's a YouTube of Hillary mentioning Ayers in a debate:

If I remember correctly, Obama immediately slammed Hillary for mentioning the guy, since Bill Clinton either pardoned or commuted the prison sentences of two convicted Weather Underground members near the end of his second term. Obama and Hillary shouldn't air dirty Democrat laundry during debates.

Ayers and Obama both live in the same high-toned Hyde Park suburb of Chicago. (Yeah, lots of the anti-capitalists seek out those places. But Ayers has the unique distinction of having said "Kill the rich". They've served on boards together, and Obama had one of his early state senate fundraiser/exploratory committee meetings at Ayers' home.)

I've been waiting on the Republicans to make a bigger deal out of this guy, but so far not much has happened. They've created a mock FaceBook page, showing Obama and Ayers as "friends". Kind of funny, but not enough to justify the trouble they went through to create it. If the Republican National Committee thinks this will save them from the horrors of one-party government, they're mistaken.

Republicans need to get kicked out of office nationwide so they can get back to their small government roots. But I've worked in manufacturing for a long time, and I just hate to see an underutilized resource like Bill Ayers. They could do so much more than FaceBook silliness.

William Ayers is god's gift to Republicans, but they're too timid to do anything with him. Or maybe McCain is too much the military gentleman to get down in the mud.

If that's the case, McCain is doomed.

You don't need a Weatherman to see which way the wind blows.