5

well done on the snark factor. for a moment i thought this was plausible.

from “Dreams From My Father” as kindling to burn an American flag.

Perhaps it’s safer to say that Rev. Wright wrote Obama’s speeches, or that Freddie Mae executives actually took his bar exam for him.

I hope a lot of people read that post at the minority report blog.

After doing some research, al-Mansour also comes up as a possiblity. Both Ayers and al-Mansour are good candidates. Although, I think you hit the nail on the head with Ayers. Association with them certainly makes me question where one’s loyalty lies; and the subject matter in whole has an elitist/racist tone that is counter to everything that America stands for.

For God’s sake, we are looking desperate. When we rec list this stupid crap, all we do is look like idiots.

People, let’s quit being stupid and ignorant with these kinds of stories. This just looks pathetic, and any liberal media criticism that comes our way with this crap is rightfully deserved.

Our party is falling apart people.

Do you folks really believe this stuff?

… but I don’t think you have a really good case here. I’d love it to be true, but I think you’re wrong.

I’ve read your post, and the one on your own blog, and it seems like you’re stretching your claims beyond what your evidence supports.

Here’s what you can prove:

1) Barack Obama’s first memoir is written in a very different style than his second.
2) His first memoir displays a penchant for evocative language, and its sentence structure and syntax make it a more difficult read than the second memoir.
3) Ayers’ book is written in a similar style as Obama’s first book, in that it frequently uses complex sentence structures and florid language.

Here’s what you can’t prove from all that: Ayers wrote Obama’s first book. True, we don’t know that Obama himself wrote his first book (ghost writing is very common), but we can’t prove it was Ayers. The best you could hope to prove is that Obama’s first book was written by someone other than the author of the second book. You could also prove that the first memoir’s author writes in a style similar to Ayers. But there are too many people who write like that to prove anything definitively.

Indeed, it seems just as likely that Obama wrote the first book, but employed a ghost writer for the second, more popular memoir. Perhaps he did this knowing full well that his penchant for turgid prose wouldn’t go over well with a general audience. Perhaps the first memoir sounds like Ayers because they’re both academics given to convoluted writing and thinking. In any event, absent evidence of extensive plagiarism (something you do not even claim) there is no way to prove a link between the authors of Dreams from My Father and Fugitive Days.

Maybe the trolls and mobies are right. Maybe we’ve become too much of an echo chamber that we’ve forgotten than we can’t just preach to the choir and expect to win new converts. All the focus on Ayers to me means that RS is losing touch with non-aligned middle America.

The number one issue is the economy. The Democrats have been busy (successfully) laying the blame on the GOP and the groundwork to take the American economy in a more Soviet direction with these voters.

Think beyond the Presidential race. It is now not beyond the scope of possibility that Democrats would have a filibuster proof majority in the Senate (add in our “moderates” and “Bipartisans” and there’s nothing they can’t do) and an eighty vote majority in the House, far more than enough.

George W. Bush and his Administration’s horrific lack of communication skills and even the most basic political survival instincts has shot a bullet into the heart of the Republican Party.

---

 To me, “consensus” seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies. So it is something in which no one believes and to which no one objects … There are still people in my party who believe in “consensus” politics. I regard them as Quislings, as traitors … I mean it.
      - Margaret Thatcher
NOTE: “consensus” = “Bipartisanship™”/”Centrism™”

Foolish.

Would I take this case into court today? No, but the very dismissive comments on this string are missplaced.

First, books are ghostwritten all the time. Kennedy’s *Profiles in Courage *was not penned exclusively, if at all, by John F. Kennedy. So the possibility that Obama’s was written by someone with whom he associated, a Professor of English amongst other less noble titles, is not a stretch.

Don’t dismiss out of hand the similarities in syntax, word usage, etc. These types of similarities are analyzed all the time in courts throughout the U.S. — with people who study writing styles to establish authorship of a particular written piece.

Finally, let me ask — conceptually — would it really surprise you that a presidential-wannabe, whose writing skills aren’t stellar, would use someone to write a book for him/her? Again, Kennedy, for example.

Is this a case to win with in court at the moment, no. But it’s certainly a case that I would take as a client and investigate the heck out of, before dismissing it out of hand as desperation.

A number of people on this thread have assumed that it is suspicious that Obama had not had some sort of written trail prior to becoming the President of the law review (see, e.g., Putter above: “It is highly suspicious that we have not one single writing sample from the editor of the Harvard Law Review. You have to pen several good pieces to become a law review underling at a high profile school.”)

Putter’s statement above is simply not true. I was an editor of the HLS law review - one tries out for the law review after your first year in law school. Virtually no one that is on the law review is published (at least in law journals) prior to joining the Harvard law review, or any law review. Once you are a member (at least of the Harvard law review), you have the opportunity to write an unsigned law review piece called a case comment, which is something Obama did and has been unearthed; indeed that piece was noted in Cashill’s article. But that is all that most law review editors would write - it is simply not the case that you would pen several pieces before becoming a law review editor.

Also one quick thought on the idea that Dreams from My Father was written at a 12th grade level and Audacity at Hope at a 9th grade level. I have no doubt that the assigned grade levels are accurate, but the intended audiences are completely different. Dreams from My Father is an autibiography grappling with some serious issues of identity. Audacity of Hope is a political book, completely dumbed down and is your standard book written by politicians running for office. One book is intended to be literary, the other to be persuasive. If Obama wrote a children’s book, I am sure the number of words per sentence and his sentence structure would again be tailored to his audience.

For me it doesn’t matter who really wrote Obama’s memoir.

It’s the content of that memoir that makes me vomit. With that memoir alone, Obama’s key positions in life and politics are really Marxist.

The memoir also proved that he really came from the dirty alley of Chicago Democrat Politics.

Is that Obama so admires his friend and mentor William Ayers, and was so influenced by his teachings that he used “Fugitive Days” as a model for his own book.

What no one wants to admit is what I think is rather obvious, and that is that they pretty much share the same worldview/ideology.