It has been known since the early 1980s that Wingnut, like Pi, never ends. But it has never quite been determined if Wingnut eventually repeats in a predictable pattern such that one can say with a reasonable degree of certainty that Wingnut Form X will be taken in a reasonably small temporal window, or if Wingnut simply winds on endlessly, meandering into some terrible wilderness of the paranoid.
It can now safely be said that Wingnut is, in fact, a self-repeating function.
First, some background. Jack Cashill is a minor purveyor of Wingnut who has been advancing the theory that Bill Ayers wrote Dreams From My Father, largely based on the fact that both Obama and Ayers use commas and dates and were born in Indonesia or whatever. This has been an exhaustive theory he’s worked to the point of counting syllables and sentence-length, which would make perfect sense as a way of comparing authorship if it, you know, were. But at one point, Cashill and a world-reknowned person that Cashill knows come up with this theory:
Yavelow compares the two books on any number of other characteristics and concludes, “There is a strong likelihood that the author of Fugitive Days ghost-wrote Dreams From My Father using recordings of dialog (either tape recorded or notes). Alternatively, another scenario could be possible: Ayers might have served as a ‘book doctor’.”
Now, to the present. As you might be aware, Christopher Andersen, author of American Evita: Hillary Clinton’s Path to Power just wrote a new book on the Obamas. In it, homeboy says:
Andersen writes in his book that after Obama finally got a new contract to write a book, Michelle Obama suggested that her husband get advice “from his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers.”
Obama had not as yet written anything. But he had taped interviews with family members. Andersen writes: “These oral histories, along with a partial manuscript and a truckload of notes, were given to Ayers.”
Andersen’s contention is entirely unsourced, and bears no relation to anything that anyone who was in any way involved with the writing of the book has ever said. In fact, it’s just Cashill’s assertion, with the words “Michelle Obama suggested” before it, which makes sense, because Michelle Obama is a sassy, bossy black woman and also does great hair. It’s still fucking crazy, and the only source for the contention is someone who made it up using analysis from a piece of software whose only identifiable use has been to prove that Bill Ayers sold Barack Obama crack in college.
Of course, since we now have a situation where an author with little credibility made an unsourced reference to a blog by a WorldNetDaily writer (did I mention that?) who came up with a theory based on an $1800 version of your word processor’s “Info” function, the obvious thing to do is to
go get some wings and laugh at how silly it could be
treat it as SHOCKINGLY PROVEN.
Are you kidding me? The new puff piece about Barack and Michelle by Christopher Anderson actually includes the news that Bill Ayers wrote or co-wrote Dreams of My Father?
Bitter, bitter Robert Stacy McCain:
When you need Bill Ayers to ghost-write your first book for you . . .
. . . excuse us for not joining the adoring throng of elite journalists like David Brooks, who suppose that your well-creased pants suffice to qualify you as an eminent political philosopher.
Just sayin’ . . .
Major credit to Jack Cashill of American Thinker, who did the vetting that the MSM doesn’t do any more. And I just want to remind everyone that I am the founder of Authors Against Obama, organized in May 2008 as a protest by working writers against the sweetheart deal Obama got for his first book.
You, too can join his 22-person Facebook group...if you have the integrity.
Cashill himself just quotes Andersen quoting him, claiming that it “blows a huge hole” in the myth of Obama’s authorship. It’s true, though, it does blow a huge something...
Allahpundit faces this problem head on, and by “head on”, I mean “running off the field into the bathroom, pulling out all the paper towels and then crying about not having any juice”:
Some might even argue that he reached his conclusion after reading Cashill’s original blog, without citing it. Andersen faces the same credibility problem Bob Woodward faces, since he is often charged with making outrageous charges in some of his books without offering any proof that conversations he could not have been privy to took place. But Woodward’s use of such a technique never has hurt his reputation. After all, he is Bob Woodward. Reviewers of Andersen’s book have had no compunction in labeling much of what he writes as pure ‘gossip.’”
...Yes. That is his argument.
Wingnut has officially eaten itself and declared its own body the tastiest meal ever. Now, for it to blame far-left liberals for the fact that so much of its own ass is missing.
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And as with so many other bizarre claims, we’re still left wondering: even if any of this far-fetched sourceless nonsense WERE true…. so what?