Obama used terrorist Ayers as a ghostwriter

[Nyarlathotep]

I provided the answer concerning Obama’s alleged brilliant legal mind.

This is a forum of skeptics isn’t it?

Yes it is, and skeptics look at evidence.

baseless speculation based on your own personal biases <> evidence.

Pulling things out of your rear end ("Professor Lawrence Tribe probably wrote the answers to Obama’s law questions") <> Evidence

Need I go on?

 

[Iamme]

Do you Obamaites think that guys like Sean Hannity (who espouses his own moral character quite often) and Michaael Medved would stoop low to dig up bogus Ayers connections simply so McCain can win?

 

[leftysergeant]

Do you Obamaites think that guys like Sean Hannity (who espouses his own moral character quite often) and Michaael Medved would stoop low to dig up bogus Ayers connections simply so McCain can win?

Well, given that Medved is a religious bigot and Hannity is a dimbulb, yes.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Wow, talk about a smear campaign. From the OP article

These parallels intrigue perhaps, but they prove little. To add a little science to the analysis, I identified two similar "nature" passages in Obama's and Ayers' respective memoirs, the first from Fugitive Days:

"I picture the street coming alive, awakening from the fury of winter, stirred from the chilly spring night by cold glimmers of sunlight angling through the city."


The second from Dreams:

"Night now fell in midafternoon, especially when the snowstorms rolled in, boundless prairie storms that set the sky close to the ground, the city lights reflected against the clouds."


These two sentences are alike in more than their poetic sense, their length and their gracefully layered structure. They tabulate nearly identically on the Flesch Reading Ease Score (FRES), something of a standard in the field.

That these passages are alike is laughable.

(Not to mention the ton of posts in this thread which refute the garbage in that OP article.)

Unbelievable. Who are these JREF forum members posting so much garbage about Obama? It borders on the bizarre.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Do you Obamaites think that guys like Sean Hannity (who espouses his own moral character quite often) and Michaael Medved would stoop low to dig up bogus Ayers connections simply so McCain can win?

It's hard to say listening to Lou Dobbs, the Fox crew and Scarborough which of them is involved in the smear campaign and which are simply willing to believe it as you and others in the forum are.

 

[Skeptic Ginger]

Jonathan Alder from the right wing National Review had this to say about Cashill's lunacy:

Ayers as Obama's Ghost Writer?!? [Jonathan Adler]

C'mon Andy. Giving credence to Jack Cashill's maybe-Ayers-wrote-Obama's-book theory is a bit much. This is even more outlandish than his stuff alleging a possible connection between Enron and Ron Brown's death. Even if Obama's book was ghost-written — and I've seen no evidence that it was — fingering Ayers as the potential author is nutter-territory stuff.

 

[JoeEllison]

I've posted on this subject in other forums, but my point bears repeating: there is NO GOOD REASON to assume that Obama didn't write his own book, and the "argument" from the right-wing is blatantly stupid, beyond the lack of evidence. Only an idiot would assert that someone could be a graduate of Columbia and honor graduate of Harvard Law, and yet could not write a 480-page book in five years.

 

[Nyarlathotep]

Do you Obamaites think that guys like Sean Hannity (who espouses his own moral character quite often) and Michaael Medved would stoop low to dig up bogus Ayers connections simply so McCain can win?

Do you think the Pope is Catholic?

As for Hanity espousing his own moral character, it is my experience that the more someone protests about how moral a person he is, the greater the cahnce theya re a complete scumbag.

 

[GreyICE]

Do you Obamaites think that guys like Sean Hannity (who espouses his own moral character quite often) and Michaael Medved would stoop low to dig up bogus Ayers connections simply so McCain can win?

How many variants on the word 'yes' are you looking to get here? Obviously? Absolutely?

P.S. Sean Hannity has a great moral character? Does that include lying for the president like a rug?

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/kfiles/b91585.html

His statements versus reality. He says he has a great moral character? What's one more lie on a long list?

 

[MaGZ]

I've posted on this subject in other forums, but my point bears repeating: there is NO GOOD REASON to assume that Obama didn't write his own book, and the "argument" from the right-wing is blatantly stupid, beyond the lack of evidence. Only an idiot would assert that someone could be a graduate of Columbia and honor graduate of Harvard Law, and yet could not write a 480-page book in five years.

Obama was given those grades and honors to promote him politically in the future. The fact that he wrote nothing for the Harvard Review should give you concern. Also his grades at Columbia have never been released.

 

[leftysergeant]

Obama was given those grades and honors to promote him politically in the future. The fact that he wrote nothing for the Harvard Review should give you concern. Also his grades at Columbia have never been released.

My toes laugh at this.

Why would a prestigious university put its reputation on the line to advance the political future of a nobody from some place or other?

Are you alleging presciene on the part of some professor? Little anachronism problem?

 

[KoihimeNakamura]

1) He did
2) Why would they do that? They'd need to be psychic

 

[varwoche]

I'm having a little difficulty finding the post quoted above. I'm sure it's not been altered................

Replying to this modbox in thread will be off topic  Posted By: tim

Obviously I added the blue text. As to the rest, the text you're looking for is located <drumroll> in the post that was linked to by the quote function.

eta: Well, obvious to me but clearly mileage varies. Which means I owe DrBaltar an apology.

 

[leftysergeant]

Wow, talk about a smear campaign. From the OP article That these passages are alike is laughable.

(Not to mention the ton of posts in this thread which refute the garbage in that OP article.)

Unbelievable. Who are these JREF forum members posting so much garbage about Obama? It borders on the bizarre.

Speaking as a poet, I find the first passage to contain very concrete images.

The second uses some very interesting similes, such as "Night coming at mid-day," "the sky dropping down."

To anyone who thinks that these passages are at all close in poetic merit:
Don't quit your day job. You will not make it as a literary critic."

Just my USD.02 worth as a poet.

 

[Cleon]

Do you Obamaites think that guys like Sean Hannity (who espouses his own moral character quite often) and Michaael Medved would stoop low to dig up bogus Ayers connections simply so McCain can win?

I'm not an "Obamaite."

But yes, yes, I do think that.

I also think that bears poop in the woods.

 

[Ausmerican]

I'm not an "Obamaite."

But yes, yes, I do think that.

I also think that bears poop in the woods.

How DARE you sir?!
This slur will NOT go unchallanged!
Thare are standards of decency you know.
Bears across the country are at this time organizing protests against your callous usage of them in the same post box as Medved and Hannity.

 

[Dr Adequate]

MaGZ, let me point out a little problem with your fantasy world.

As you have realized, it is always possible to pretend that everything Obama wrote was written by someone else. Thus you can declare, with superb disregard for all the evidence before us, that "Nothing has been presented that shows Obama has written anything of real substance." Petitio principii much?

By these means, you are able to conceal from yourself the fact that there is at least one black person who is smarter than you, who has achieved more than you, and who may very well be elected President while White Nationalists are treated as the pariahs which, frankly, they are.

Now, this is standard fare for paranoid lunatics. You imagine a big conspiracy stretching back for decades and decades to conceal the fact that Obama isn't as smart as he looks. Given the level of your paranoia, you are probably capable of imagining that the shadowy cabal of Laurence Tribe and Bill Ayers and the Joos have been controlling the whole of history from the 1960s onwards to bring us to this point.

Again, standard paranoid fare.

But the bit that, I hope, will keep even you puzzled, is this. Why the **** did they not use, as their front-man, someone who was actually intelligent? Instead of this massive elaborate decades-long conspiracy to pretend that Obama can write books, couldn't they have fielded someone who really could write books?

As with most stupid paranoid conspiracy theories, there's no frickin' point in doing it this way. The imaginary conspiracy is only necessary to bolster your fantasy that Obama isn't that good at writing prose. The vast legions of ghosts required to pretend that Obama is smart are necessary only to protect your fantasy world. They are conjured into being only by your sad, dirty, pathetic need for them to exist, so that their phantom battalions can protect you from reality. But in the real world, they don't actually exist, 'cos no-one needs them. Even if there was a secret cabal controlling the world, they wouldn't be necessary. There is no point in secretly controlling the world in such a stupidly elaborate manner. You have done as all whackos do --- to protect a little dumb fantasy, you have constructed a much bigger dumb fantasy.

No-one needs this conspiracy, no-one could possibly need this conspiracy ... except you. You need it like a child frightened of the monsters under its bed needs its teddy-bear.

Grow up.

 

[DrBaltar]

Obviously I added the blue text. As to the rest, the text you're looking for is located <drumroll> in the post that was linked to by the quote function.

eta: Well, obvious to me but clearly mileage varies. Which means I owe DrBaltar an apology.

Thank you Varwoche

 

[davefoc]

Do you Obamaites think that guys like Sean Hannity (who espouses his own moral character quite often) and Michaael Medved would stoop low to dig up bogus Ayers connections simply so McCain can win?

I guess you are asking this seriously.

Fox News for weeks now has been devoted to getting John McCain elected.

There is not a shred of intellectual honesty in their approach. Editorials and news stories alike are driven by this goal.

Fox has banged away on the non-story of Bill Ayers for weeks in a dazzling array of permutations. They have blown up the ACORN story vastly out of proportion and have tried every conceivable angle to tie Obama to it.

Somebody might argue that those are important stories that other networks aren't giving sufficient air to. Great, where are the similar kinds of stories about McCain? ETA: Did they miss the part about where McCain's campaign manager was a lobbyist for the GSE's or that the man in charge of his transition team headed up a lobbying firm that acted illegally for Saddam Hussein?

Fox has endlessly repeated the Republican mantra about the tax and spend Democrats without once bringing up the 4.5 trillion dollars the Republicans spent that the country didn't have. How can the Republicans be for low taxes when they are for massive crony driven spending? Who does Fox think is going to repay that debt? Fox does not have an ideological view. They have a partisan view and the difference is enormous. Fox has acted as an enabler for corrupt Republican governance. And in that they have harmed the Republican Party enormously, but they have harmed the country even more.

If McCain wins this and he might Fox News will have absolutely been responsible. Obama might have more campaign funds than McCain at his disposal but I think he might trade that advantage for his own 24/7 infomercial that Fox has become for McCain.

ETA: And this story about Ayers writing Obama's book is exactly the kind of crap that has become a staple of Fox News. Hannity recently presented it as an unquestioned fact that Ayers ghost wrote Obama's book. We are watching the big lie technique in action here and it just might work well enough to get McCain and Palin elected.

 

[332nd]

How is this for a more realistic example, than your pink elephants example:

You are married. Your wife makes her money from writing books. You are very proud of her accomplishments and admire her as a person. Now suppose you get an anonymous phone call from someone saying your wife has been cheating on you. AND to make matters worse, this person said that all that money you have been getting from your wife's books is not from the fact of her writing prowess, but a result of her lover, who has been helping her write them!

I bet you would then look into THAT, wouldn't you.

... I can't speak for bolo but no, I wouldn't. Looking into one's spouse cheating based on an anonymous phone call? Sorry. I'm just not that insecure.

ETA: And a more realistic example would be getting a phone call saying your spouse is cheating and the money is really coming from their lover from someone who really wants to sleep with your spouse and would like to have the income from the books.