Comparing him to the Riddler character on the 1960s "Batman" television series, WND columnist Jack Cashill said former Weather Underground co-founder Bill Ayers is still playing games with his tongue-in-cheek claims to have authored Barack Obama’s autobiography “Dreams from My Father.”
Cashill, in his 2001 book “Deconstructing Obama: The Life, Loves, and Letters of the First Postmodern President,” presented a content analysis in which he argued Ayers’ authorship of Obama’s autobiography could be determined by comparing thematic constructions and similarity of language between Ayers’ 2001 book “Fugitive Days” and Obama’s “Dreams.”
“Ayers likes the idea people think he is the real author of ‘Dreams,’” Cashill said. “But Ayers knows that if he were to admit seriously he was Obama’s ghost writer, Ayers would alienate his radical friends and neighbors who still support Obama.”
The controversy surfaced once again last week when Red Emma’s Bookstore Coffeehouse in Baltimore announced Ayers' appearance last week at a book signing event.
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The announcement said that in Ayers' new book, “Public Enemy: Confessions of an American Dissident,” he repeated his “confessions” that he wrote “Dreams.”
A YouTube video, including comments by Donald Trump and Andrew Breitbart, features media reaction to Cashill’s claims that Ayers ghost-wrote Obama’s “Dreams.”
“Ayers has spent his entire career playing games,” Cashill told WND. “Even when he was a Weather Underground bomber, Ayers was more of a ‘pretend revolutionary’ than a real revolutionary. Truly, Ayers did not want to pay the consequences of being a real revolutionary.”
Arguing that Ayers’ radicalism is largely theater, Cashill pointed out he has a pattern of lacing his "admissions" with irony, leaving doubt in the minds of his audiences.
In March 2011, WND reported Ayers, at the conclusion of a speech sponsored by the Students for a Democratic Society at Montclair State University in New Jersey, admitted in response to a question that he authored “Dreams" but lamented he did not get paid the millions of dollars in royalties Obama received.
See video of Ayers' response at Montclair State:
In “Public Enemy,” Ayers devotes some six pages to discussing the idea he had ghostwritten “Dreams.”
Mentioning Cashill by name, Ayers attempts to ridicule his scholarship:
A self-described deep-thinking intellectual named Jack Cashill set out to prove – independent of my denials or affirmations – that I had indeed written “Dreams.” He sought real evidence through a close readings of texts and a brush with the Internet. He was the great brain who discovered, for example, those infamous maritime references and metaphors in both “Dreams” and “Fugitive Days,” a possible testament to my fraught time as a merchant marine. In any case, it was now clear that I had been the seafaring Odysseus to Obama’s father-hungry Telemachus, and “Dreams” the “record of a personal, interior journey – a boy’s search for his father.” I loved the reflection, and loved imagining my few months on the Atlantic as an epic tale of the human journey.
In the end, Ayers leaves it up to the reader to decide if Cashill’s argument is correct or not.
“Empirical proof or crackpot confirmation, you decide,” Ayers wrote, refusing once again to give a definitive answer.
On Friday, Cashill is scheduled to appear in East Hanover, N.J., to sign copies of his most recent book, “If I Had a Son,” published by WND Books, which uncovers the real story behind the headlines of the George Zimmerman trial.
Cashill told WND his speech “Lying for the Truth,” will concentrate on the duplicity of the establishment media’s leftist political slant as it maintains its reporting is non-biased and “factual.”
Cashill’s presentation on Book TV discussing “Deconstructing Obama” can be viewed here.