Has Ayers gone public about writing “Dreams”? *UPDATED*
Although the dinosaur media has assiduously ignored the story about Ayer’s authorship of Dreams of my Father, people are beginning to recognize the impact from the combination of Jack Cashill’s articles about the stylistic similarities between Dreams of my Father and Bill Ayer’s writing (similarities too great to be mere coincidence), and a new book’s report that neighbors knew Ayers was doing the writing. Aside from the obvious impact on conservatives, who have never been able to reconcile Obama’s leaden unprompted speech or pre-Dreams writing with the elegant prose in Dreams, the story may be having an impact on Bill Ayers. Now that the cat is out of the bag (or, at least, is in the process of being dragged out by its whiskers), Ayers may be disgruntled about the fact that Obama has leap-frogged to the highest position in the land without even a nod to Ayers.
If Ayers isn’t feeling the weight of the truth, how else does one explain the fact that Ayers reportedly told Anne Leary, a conservative blogger he met at the airport, that it was he who wrote Dreams? Please note that I said wrote, not edited.
My first thought when I heard this story was that it was a hoax. But if you read Leary’s post, which includes a picture of a scruffy Ayers in an airport, it doesn’t read like a hoax at all. It reads like a narcissist (and everyone in Obama’s circle seems to suffer from that personality disorder) who’s hacked off that he paved the way but didn’t get the glory. As James Simpson says (at American Thinker):
My understanding of communists is that most would know better and keep their mouths shut. But Ayers is a bit different. He is, as he says, a “small ‘c’ communist,” but he is also, in a certain, slimy way, an entrepreneur, as we explained in Monday’s post. (Apologies in advance to entrepreneurs everywhere.) He grew up a very rich kid, used to getting everything he wanted. Even as an adult his career has relied on a hand up from his wealthy father. His past statements and radical activities also mark him as a megalomaniac. In youth he drew attention to himself by blowing things up. As an adult “educator” he merely attempts to subvert children. But that doesn’t seem to be going so well.
He is under a lot of pressure, too. Ayers and his horrid wife Bernardine Dohrn are believed to have planned and executed the San Francisco Park Police Station bombing in 1970 that killed police sergeant Brian V. McDonnell and wounded several others. Efforts to bring them to justice have been underway for some time, as brought to light this past March in a National Press Club conference put on by Cliff Kincaid of America’s Survival.
This is no small matter. Obama leapt to fame, not because of his life story itself, but because the liberal establishment decide that his poetic, luminous prose was proof positive that Obama was a genius. It was his writing style, not his story, that won him the accolades and respect that catapulted him to political prominence. This is distinct from a situation in which a person has a compelling life story, but needs help writing. In the latter situation, even if it’s a little bit humiliating when the truth comes out, the focus remains on the person’s accomplishments, not their need for a ghost. (Witness John F. Kennedy’s autobiography ghostwritten book.)
But what if the life story is just your usual Oprah-rific narrative of a pathetic loner who has accomplished nothing but whining, smoking and visiting with relatives? And what if the only distinctive aspect of the story is the intellectualism behind the writing itself? And what if that writing was done by a radical communist who attempted murder and is married to a woman who almost certainly succeeded in committing murder? What happens to the whole narrative then? Not the narrative in the book, of course, but the narrative that sees a vapid, self-centered being elevated to the pinnacle of world success based on nothing more than his prose.
UPDATE: Hoax.
