Literary Lion Obama Will Roar No More

Literary Lion Obama Will Roar No More
American Thinker ^ | September 28, 2009 | Jack Cashill

Posted on Monday, September 28, 2009 1:53:38 AM by neverdem

The major media will not likely tackle the emerging evidence of Obama’s stunning literary fraud, but the days of Obama’s boasting about his writing skills are just as likely over.

The immediate cause of concern at the White House is Christopher Andersen’s largely benign new book, Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage.

 

Andersen contends that the ambitious Obama, unaware of JFK’s own literary fraud, hoped to launch his own political career with a book as did John Kennedy with the discreetly ghost-written Profiles In Courage. 

 

Despite a large advance, Obama found himself “hopelessly blocked.”  After four futile years of trying to finish, Obama “sought advice from his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers.”  This he did “at Michelle’s urging,” she being the more pragmatic half of the couple.

 

What attracted the Obamas were “Ayers’s proven abilities as a writer.” Barack particularly liked the fluid novelistic style of To Teach, a 1993 book by Ayers.  This he hoped to emulate for his own family history.  In fact, he had already taped interviews with many of his relatives, both African and American.  The key sentence in Andersen’s account is the one that follows:

 

“These oral histories, along with his partial manuscript and a trunkload of notes were given to Ayers.” Adds Andersen, “Thanks to help from veteran writer Ayers, Barack would be able to submit a manuscript to his editors at Times Book.”  The manuscript in question would become Obama’s 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father, what Joe Klein of Time Magazine called “the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician.”

 

From textual sleuthing, I had come to a comparable conclusion more than a year ago, namely that Obama had “turned the framework of his life over to terrorist emeritus Bill Ayers who roughed it in with his own darker sentiments and experiences.”  Embedded here is a visual summary of this research, produced by Chris Kusnell.  (Part I) (Part II)

 

As one example of Ayers’ involvement, I had argued that Dreams‘ tale of Obama’s year-long relationship with a rich, green-eyed lovely seemed to have mined the details of Ayers’ own relationship to the late Weatherwoman Diana Oughton.  From a close reading, I doubted there was such a girl in Obama’s life.  So does Andersen.  “No one,” he writes, “including his roommate and closest friend at the time, Siddiqi, knew of this mysterious lover’s existence.”

 

It did not matter, however, how accurate was my analysis.  From the perspective of Obama’s literary defenders, I was a barbarian who could effectively be kept in check outside the gates.

 

Andersen writes from within the gates.  He has no agenda.  His book is dispassionate, softly liberal and largely sympathetic to the Obamas, particularly to Michelle and her family.  A popular celebrity journalist, he interviewed some 200 people for the book, many of them close to the Obama family. The Obamas had likely given at least their tacit blessing to the project.  Given that the natural audience for his book skews female and left, Andersen had no reason to invent facts that would alienate his base.  He has no track record of doing the same.

 

Although Andersen cites me on textual comparisons, I was clearly not the source for the personal details of Obama’s life.  His retelling of the story was based on what he had been told by someone very close to the action. He had access to people who would never have talked to me, quite possibly Michelle herself or even Bill Ayers.

 

Clearly shaken, the Obama-centric media find themselves in a fix not unlike that of medieval astronomers upon discovery of a new planet.  Every time this happened, these geocentrists had to figure out a convoluted new loop to describe the planet’s rotation around the earth.  So it is with challenges to the Obama myth, even unwitting ones like Andersen’s.  Obama’s acolytes must find some convoluted new explanation to account for each unexpected deviance from the mythic overview.

Ref

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2349854/posts

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