Did Bill Ayers Write Obama's Dreams from My Father?

[Brainster]

I could have posted this in Politics or Literature, but I wanted to convey my thinking about the topic by putting it here in Conspiracy Theories. Jack Cashill has a pretty long article in the American Thinker today about similarities between Obama's writing and Ayers.

Cashill certainly starts off with a very weak issue: Both Obama in Dreams and Ayers in A Kind and Just Parent refer to Carl Sandburg's famous summation of Chicago as "Hog butcher to the world", but they both get it wrong! Sandburg actually called Chi-Town "Hog butcher for the world"!



And the next bit is even weaker. Cashill and his correspondent find 180 close matches between Dreams and Ayers' books, but only 6 of those apply to one of Cashill's own books. But that doesn't really tell us anything; it would be far more useful to know how many close matches there are between Cashill's book and Ayers' books.

There are some strong points. For example, Cashill notes this:

In To Teach, Ayers recounts the story of an ambitious teacher who takes her students out to the streets of New York to learn about its culture and history. These students ask to see the nearby Hudson River. When they get to the river's edge, one student says, " Look, the river is flowing up." A second student says, "No, it has to flow south-down." Upon further research, the teacher discovers "that the Hudson River is a tidal river, that it flows both north and south, and they had visited the exact spot where the tide stops its northward push."

In Dreams, written two years later, Obama takes an unlikely detour to the exact spot on the parallel East River where the north-flowing tide meets the south-flowing river. There, improbably, a young black boy approaches this strange man and asks, "You know why sometimes the river runs that way and then sometimes it goes this way?" Obama tells the boy it "had to do with the tides."

That does seem oddly coincidental; of course a less conspiratorial mind might assume that Obama appropriated the incident in Dreams.

What amuses me about this stuff is that it's exactly like the attempts in 2003 and 2004 to prove that Bush had been AWOL from his Air National Guard unit back in the 1970s. It fundamentally misunderstands the difference between a candidate running for the first time and the President of the United States running for election. Nobody is going to vote for or against President Obama based on his prior associations; it's all on what Obama does in office the next several years and the performance of the US economy.

 

[NWO Sentryman]

tl;dr

Stundie right there

 

[Foolmewunz]

So let's recap...

You've found weak, weak, and coincidental. Yet you were kind enough to bring it to our attention. Why shucks, Brainster, butter wouldn't melt in your mouth.


Let's see... on the coincidental one. They both are making up a form of allegory and using it in their book. What's the chance that instead of ghost-writing or of BO copying Ayers, it's just evidence of similar source material or that maybe they were of a group (in a class, a meeting, a discussion group) where someone used the same example.

I think mine reads better....

 

[elbe]

Didn't BAC make that claim last year sometime?

 

[T.A.M.]

I could have posted this in Politics or Literature, but I wanted to convey my thinking about the topic by putting it here in Conspiracy Theories. Jack Cashill has a pretty long article in the American Thinker today about similarities between Obama's writing and Ayers.

Cashill certainly starts off with a very weak issue: Both Obama in Dreams and Ayers in A Kind and Just Parent refer to Carl Sandburg's famous summation of Chicago as "Hog butcher to the world", but they both get it wrong! Sandburg actually called Chi-Town "Hog butcher for the world"!



And the next bit is even weaker. Cashill and his correspondent find 180 close matches between Dreams and Ayers' books, but only 6 of those apply to one of Cashill's own books. But that doesn't really tell us anything; it would be far more useful to know how many close matches there are between Cashill's book and Ayers' books.

There are some strong points. For example, Cashill notes this:



That does seem oddly coincidental; of course a less conspiratorial mind might assume that Obama appropriated the incident in Dreams.

What amuses me about this stuff is that it's exactly like the attempts in 2003 and 2004 to prove that Bush had been AWOL from his Air National Guard unit back in the 1970s. It fundamentally misunderstands the difference between a candidate running for the first time and the President of the United States running for election. Nobody is going to vote for or against President Obama based on his prior associations; it's all on what Obama does in office the next several years and the performance of the US economy.

your behavior is almost...truther like

I mean you are "Just Asking Questions" right.

TAM

 

[Robster FCD]

I'm not sure Brainster deserves attack for presenting this, as he clearly places it as a low quality conspiracy theory.

It wouldn't surprise me if Obama had read one of Ayer's books and gotten the Sandburg quote from it, along with the mistake. He might have even acted as a friendly pre-editor reader, offering the in-correction.

Rivers that change direction based on tides are pretty well known to people with some scientific background, so a president knowing this might be a surprise after so many years with scientific illiterates in the White House.

 

[Foolmewunz]

I'm not sure Brainster deserves attack for presenting this, as he clearly places it as a low quality conspiracy theory.

It wouldn't surprise me if Obama had read one of Ayer's books and gotten the Sandburg quote from it, along with the mistake. He might have even acted as a friendly pre-editor reader, offering the in-correction.

Rivers that change direction based on tides are pretty well known to people with some scientific background, so a president knowing this might be a surprise after so many years with scientific illiterates in the White House.

Of course he does! Brainster does this often. If it wasn't so transparent, it'd be nasty, but as it is, well... it's just Brainster doing his partisan thing... Making sure he helps get as many smears out there while conveniently distancing himself from them by disingenuously stating that he doesn't believe it in the first place. It's a non-election year, but Brainster's dedicated to his Republican cause and knows that the more crap that's thrown against the wall, the more opportunities for some of it to stick.

Like Louis in Casablanca, he's shocked, shocked I tell you.....

 

[Brainster]

Of course he does! Brainster does this often. If it wasn't so transparent, it'd be nasty, but as it is, well... it's just Brainster doing his partisan thing... Making sure he helps get as many smears out there while conveniently distancing himself from them by disingenuously stating that he doesn't believe it in the first place. It's a non-election year, but Brainster's dedicated to his Republican cause and knows that the more crap that's thrown against the wall, the more opportunities for some of it to stick.

Like Louis in Casablanca, he's shocked, shocked I tell you.....

Well, I can see I certainly brought this up in the right forum; the Brainster Twoofers are out in force. In your spare time, perhaps you could prove that Delphi Ote is really a Loose Change fan for starting the long-running thread on that subject. And it's clear using your logic that Gravy was secretly running the entire 9-11 Truth Movement from these pages up until his resignation in favor of Ryan Mackey.

And Parky secretly loves Israel and supports its every action.

 

[Brainster]

I'm not sure Brainster deserves attack for presenting this, as he clearly places it as a low quality conspiracy theory.

It wouldn't surprise me if Obama had read one of Ayer's books and gotten the Sandburg quote from it, along with the mistake. He might have even acted as a friendly pre-editor reader, offering the in-correction.

Rivers that change direction based on tides are pretty well known to people with some scientific background, so a president knowing this might be a surprise after so many years with scientific illiterates in the White House.

Erm, you accept that he might have gotten the Sandburg quote from Ayers' book but not the tides story? The Sandburg quote is a common mistake; indeed I'd argue that Sandburg himself phrased it poorly and that "hog butcher to the world" sounds and reads better.

So that there is no doubt, I find the notion that Ayers wrote Obama's book completely nutty. Maybe Obama pilfered the Hudson flows north and south bit from Ayers. Maybe they both got it from a third source; maybe Royko wrote about it one morning. But that's about it; an interesting coincidence with a bunch of BS draped around it to make it seem like there's lots of similar stuff.

 

[T.A.M.]

Erm, you accept that he might have gotten the Sandburg quote from Ayers' book but not the tides story? The Sandburg quote is a common mistake; indeed I'd argue that Sandburg himself phrased it poorly and that "hog butcher to the world" sounds and reads better.

So that there is no doubt, I find the notion that Ayers wrote Obama's book completely nutty. Maybe Obama pilfered the Hudson flows north and south bit from Ayers. Maybe they both got it from a third source; maybe Royko wrote about it one morning. But that's about it; an interesting coincidence with a bunch of BS draped around it to make it seem like there's lots of similar stuff.

I know, but you know I had to tease...I don't hang in the politics forum any more...lol

TAM

 

[Brainster]

I know, but you know I had to tease...I don't hang in the politics forum any more...lol

TAM

Well, it's rather annoying because when I post this stuff on my political blog and say it's a lot of bunk I get accused of being an Alinsky disciple working to undermine the conservative movement. And when I post it here, people with the conservative decoder ring like Foolmewunz see right away that I'm promoting the story by talking about what a bunch of BS it is.

Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right.

 

[T.A.M.]

Here I am, stuck in the middle of Poo!!

TAM

 

[Foolmewunz]

C'mon Brainster,
You've had this pointed out to you before. You're admittedly partisan and maybe you can't actually see what you're doing, but frankly, I doubt it.
(It's not of a caliber with the absolute frothing at the mouth hate-mongering that goes on in politics, but it's still rather obviously partisan.)
I see nothing wrong with it. Post what you want. I also see nothing wrong with pointing out what I think (that'd be as in "opinion") you're doing.

 

[Brainster]

C'mon Brainster,
You've had this pointed out to you before. You're admittedly partisan and maybe you can't actually see what you're doing, but frankly, I doubt it.
(It's not of a caliber with the absolute frothing at the mouth hate-mongering that goes on in politics, but it's still rather obviously partisan.)
I see nothing wrong with it. Post what you want. I also see nothing wrong with pointing out what I think (that'd be as in "opinion") you're doing.

No, I can't "see" what I'm doing here. And from now on, I won't see what you're doing here either.

 

[Brainster]

Here are some more conservatives who clearly are supporting the conspiracy theory about Obama's book being authored by Ayers.

Jonah Goldberg:

Really? The hog-butcher line is a plodding cliche, not some obscure reference. There's not a whiff of plagiarism here, the language and context read completely differently. As for them both getting the quote wrong, so what? I would bet that most, or at least a great many, people get that quote wrong in the same way. If you search Google Books, you'll find 605 books or excerpts using the "to" and 655 using "for." If you search Nexis you'll find 536 instances of "to" and only 382 of "for."

Cashill has many other examples like this one and a lot more that are much worse (i.e. less persuasive). Indeed he calls this "hog butcher" instance an "A" level example and cites it first presumably because it packs a wallop. It's not a wallop; it's a whiff.

Using the secret conservative decoder ring, what Goldberg really means is "Ayers must have written it!"

Tom Maguire:

So let me see if I understand. A careful reader identified 180 matches between Ayers' work and Obama's that Mr. Cashill considered to be "B-level or above". Mr. Cashill only matched at most sixteen of those phrases or features in his own writing, thereby proving... what?

Well, shame on Tom, because my conservative decoder ring reveals that what Maguire is subtly doing is encouraging speculation on the matter.

Fortunately his readers are not easily fooled:

Lookit. It's all well and good to be skeptical. But Cashill is not a crackpot, he's done very thorough work, and it has substantive statistical weight behind it. You can dismiss it, but I don't think you do yourself any favors by so doing.

Using the conservative decoder ring, we see that actually Fresh Air is the true skeptic here. Because what he's really saying is that this authorship controversy is a lot of baloney.

 

[boloboffin]

OK, come on. Brainster clearly put this topic into Conspiracy Theories and trashed the examples that he gave. Due to our collaboration in helping to take down silly Mr. Corsi, I'm more than willing to give him the benefit of the doubt here, and I don't see a lot of doubt.

Speaking of the Bush Guard issue, I had a minor sidebar in that controversy and threw up my hands in disgust when the Killian memos surfaced, the typographic wars raged, and Burkett concocted the ludicrous story of getting slipped the papers at a state fair. The forgeries came from Killian's secretary -- I'll bet my eye teeth on it, and they may or may not have been Killian's actual opinion of Bush. But at that point, I knew the whole thing was over, regardless of what Bush did in 1972.

Still I stewed and mulled over it and came to my own idiosyncratic position. I still think Bush blew off his Guard service in 1972. But it wasn't the terrible thing we were making it out to be, and better yet, I think I know why he did it.

Because he couldn't go to Vietnam.

Before his fifth year in the Guard (1972-73), Bush's service had been exemplary. Above and beyond his duty, even, and no one questions that. But something happened that threw him into a really bad tailspin. It lasted that entire fifth year, at the end of which someone lit a serious fire under his nether regions, he buckled down on the Guard service, and lit out for Harvard Business School after nailing down all the hourly requirements on him (with an extra six months tacked on by the Guard as a "don't let the door hit you" present on his record).

What happened, I believe, was he found out the plane he had been flying was being phased out in Vietnam. When he did find that out, he ran to volunteer to go to Vietnam right then and there, but he had still not acquired enough flight hours to go (something he'd been trying to do with all the overtime hours). I think he would have had enough to volunteer in his sixth year and get over to Vietnam.

But it was too late.

I do believe that strings were pulled to get Bush into the unit he was in (I know that the Champagne Unit got its name in WWII, but its reputation in Texas quickly turned 180 degrees when it became a unit to stash the rich, the connected, and the Dallas Cowboys). And I believe it chafed at him. When his personal plan to override his dad's desire and get to Vietnam anyway were yanked out from under him, I think George W. Bush had no more use for any of it.

The Guard did try to catch up with him a couple of times. He'd applied for one unit and was denied a transfer there. Then he was assigned (I believe) the unit he was eventually at, and ordered to show up on two weekends, one in September and one in October. The week before the September weekend, Prescott died. I don't think even Michael Moore would begrudge Bush going to his grandfather's funeral. And the October weekend was the weekend before the election Bush was ostensibly helping to conduct. (At the time a Republican campaign in Alabama was the poster child of free time.)

But saying that Bush ditched the Guard because his plan to actually go to Vietnam blew up in his face isn't a story that either the Democrats or the Republicans would want to tell during the Presidential race. So the Democrats say he went AWOL without digging too deep, and the Republicans smeared the whole story (they couldn't even bring up Prescott's funeral because it would have validated the story).

And that's what I think happened to Bush in 1972. I'd have to dig up the documentation on all of this, and I guess I would if anyone cared to see it. But that picture fits everything I know about Bush, the good, the bad, and the ugly. At the very least, it's the description of a human being.

 

[Brainster]

OK, come on. Brainster clearly put this topic into Conspiracy Theories and trashed the examples that he gave. Due to our collaboration in helping to take down silly Mr. Corsi, I'm more than willing to give him the benefit of the doubt here, and I don't see a lot of doubt.

Danke!

And that's what I think happened to Bush in 1972. I'd have to dig up the documentation on all of this, and I guess I would if anyone cared to see it. But that picture fits everything I know about Bush, the good, the bad, and the ugly. At the very least, it's the description of a human being.

My other point, which nobody's commenting on, still applies. When a presidential candidate is an unknown quantity, like Bush in 2000 or Obama in 2008, people do have to look into the past, because of course we know they're only showing us their good side while running. Hence the Bush DWI incident mattered a great deal in 2000; it almost resulted in a huge upset.

But Republicans are kidding themselves if they think this sort of crap will matter in 2012, which will be a referendum on the Obama first term. It won't be about Bill Ayers or any of that stuff, which I admit troubled me when Obama was running last year. Indeed, I kept trying to tell Republicans who were salivating over facing Hillary (before she got upset) that every mention of Whitewater would cost the GOP 100,000 votes.

 

[Hokulele]

<snipped the serious, valid points>

Indeed, I kept trying to tell Republicans who were salivating over facing Hillary (before she got upset) that every mention of Whitewater would cost the GOP 100,000 votes.

You say that like it was a bad thing.

 

[R.Mackey]

And it's clear using your logic that Gravy was secretly running the entire 9-11 Truth Movement from these pages up until his resignation in favor of Ryan Mackey.

HEY! OPSEC! Or else house-frying will follow!

Back in the real world, it was pretty clear to me that you didn't buy into it...

Assuming a large number of such coincidences were found, the rational explanation is that one or the other is a plagiarist, not that anything was actually ghostwritten. Happens all the time.

Or, perhaps, they're really the same person. I'm not sure whether a Dr. Jekyll / Mr. Hyde scenario, or a conjoined-twin construction, sort of like Kuato, is more parsimonious. Maybe those can be the pillars of the inevitable schism in our new Obama Truth Movement.

 

[Robster FCD]

Erm, you accept that he might have gotten the Sandburg quote from Ayers' book but not the tides story? The Sandburg quote is a common mistake; indeed I'd argue that Sandburg himself phrased it poorly and that "hog butcher to the world" sounds and reads better.

So that there is no doubt, I find the notion that Ayers wrote Obama's book completely nutty. Maybe Obama pilfered the Hudson flows north and south bit from Ayers. Maybe they both got it from a third source; maybe Royko wrote about it one morning. But that's about it; an interesting coincidence with a bunch of BS draped around it to make it seem like there's lots of similar stuff.

Actually, I suggested two possible routes that the Sandburg misquote could have come from that I feel are fairly reasonable. The tides issue is simple scientific knowledge. If a kid came up to me and made that same comment, I'd have the same reply, despite not having read any Ayers book, and the closest I have gotten to reading any Obama book is having seen a copy at my parent's house. Even if Obama gathered this specific bit of information from reading Ayers, it does not mean that the above event didn't occur, as precocious children with scientific trivia abound the world over. The probability of such an event occurring regularly, where a smart kid shows off to a stranger who is just as smart is a guaranteed occurrence.

I was quite willing to give you the benefit of the doubt on your intentions, but your response suggesting that getting a quote wrong due to a misinformed source means that plagiarism must be an equally valid possibility is not what I would call a neutral disinterest in a conspiracy theory, but a backhanded promotion of the same.