09/17/2010
One the "crazy rumors" about President Obama is that his memoir, Dreams From My Father, was actually ghostwritten by Bill Ayers. Steve Sailer mentioned this here.An anonymous commentator on Steve Sailer’s site writes:
"Sadly, it now seems that Mr. Obama had the book ghost written by neighbor Bill Ayers. Christopher Andersen’s new book Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American MarriageA quick look inside the Andersen book confirms that this is substantially true. you can confirm this yourself by looking inside it at Amazon, or downloading the ebook. (It’s actually already out.)due out soon says that Michelle said when the deadline was approaching Barrack shipped his files and tapes out to Bill Ayers to write the book. "
Here’s the significant passage from Andersen’s book:
"Desperate to finish the book, Barack and Michelle took a leave of absence from their jobs and decamped to the Indonesian island of Bali so that, as his sister Maya put it, he could "find a peaceful sanctuary, where there were no phones, to work on the book." When he returned in early 1994, Barack burrowed even deeper into the Hole in a last-gasp effort to finish it.Andersen’s sources for all this aren’t clear, for reasons of anonymity. You'll notice he doesn’t name the Hyde Park neighbor above, and he writes "Certain key sources in Washington, Chicago, Hawaii, Indonesia, and Kenya–some professional colleagues, close friends, and relatives–asked to remain anonymous and the author has respected their wishes. Accordingly, they are not listed here or elsewhere in the text."Two months later, with a September 1994 deadline looming, Barack was still stymied. It was around this time that, at Michelle’s urging, he sought advice from his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers. Michelle had known Ayers’s wife, Bernadine Dohrn, at Sidley Austin, where Dohrn worked as a paralegal between 1984 and 1988. Dohrn’s father-in-law, former Commonwealth Edison CEO Thomas Ayers, just happened to be one of the firm’s most important clients.
Barack got to know Bill Ayers’s father and his brother, John, when all three served on the Leadership Council of the Chicago Public Education Fund. Another mutual friend of Ayers and Barack was Jean Rudd, whose nonprofit Woods Fund had provided Jerry Kellman with the money he needed to hire Barack as an organizer back in 1985.
Neither Michelle nor Barack seemed particularly troubled to discover that William Ayers and Bernadine Dorhn had been two of the 1960s' most infamous radicals-leaders of the Weather Underground terrorist group that set off thirty bombs in the 1960s and 1970s.
After an explosion in the Weathermen’s Greenwich Village bomb-making laboratory killed three of their fellow Weathermen (including Ayers’s girlfriend at the time, Diana Oughton) and virtually destroyed the neighboring town house owned by Dustin Hoffman, Ayers and Dohrn went underground. In 1973 charges against them were dismissed due to prosecutorial misconduct, but Dohrn remained a fugitive until she finally turned herself in to police in 1980.
Ayers made no apologies for his terrorist past, and in the 1990s still described himself as "a radical, Leftist, small 'c' communist…. The ethics of communism still appeal to me. I don’t like Lenin as much as the early Marx."
Ayers’s radical past didn’t seem to bother Chicago’s civic leaders, many of whom worked with him on education reform. He worked particularly closely with Mayor Richard M. Daley on reshaping the city’s school programs-an effort that also brought him into contact with one of Daley’s assistants at the time, Michelle Obama.
What did interest Barack were Ayers’s proven abilities as a writer. Unlike Barack, Ayers had written and cowritten scores of articles and treatises, as well as several nonfiction books beginning with Education: An American Problem in 1968. But it was the tone Ayers had set in his latest book- To Teach(1993)-that Barack hoped to emulate.
The tale of a maverick teacher who takes her students onto the streets of New York to teach them firsthand about history, culture, and survival,To Teach was written in a fluid, novelistic style. Barack asked for Ayers’s input, and Ayers, who like so many in his circle was greatly impressed by the charismatic young activist, obliged.
To flesh out his family history, Barack had also taped interviews with Toot, Gramps, Ann, Maya, and his Kenyan relatives. These oral histories, along with his partial manuscript and a trunkload of notes, were given to Ayers. "Everyone knew they were friends and that they worked on various projects together," another Hyde Park neighbor pointed out. "It was no secret. Why would it be? People liked them both."
In the end, Ayers’s contribution to Barack’s Dreams from My Father would be significant-so much so that the book’s language, oddly specific references, literary devices, and themes would bear a jarring similarity to Ayers’s own writings. Even the caveat at the beginning of Dreams, in which Barack points out that he uses invented dialogue, embellished facts, composite characters, inaccurate chronology, and pseudonyms to create an "approximation" of reality, resembles Ayers’s defense of the inaccuracies in his memoir Fugitive Days. In the foreword to his book, Ayers states that the book is merely a collection of his personal memories and "impressions."
But Andersen is impeccably mainstream, and his references to interviews in "Washington, Chicago, Hawaii, Indonesia, and Kenya" mean he actually went there — a lot of plane travel. Almost as if he were a member of the Mainstream Media trying to find out if you can, in fact, see Russia from Sarah Palin’s house.
So I think that we can say that question is now fairly well settled — in favor of the "crazy rumor." So my question is "what, if any, other crazy rumors are true?"
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