Dr. Jack Cashill Writes that the London Times Is Inquiring into the Authorship of Senator Obama's Memoir "Dreams From My Father"

“The bizarre accusation Jack Cashill made . . . that Obama didn't write Dreams From My Father (and that Bill Ayers did) has caught fire in the blogosphere and on talk radio.”---Kirsten Powers, New York Post (10-29-08)

UPDATE: London Times dismissive of Dr. Cashill's theory (11-2-08)

I have a question for Senator Obama: Did Bill Ayers help you write your memoir Dreams From My Father? Just answer the question "yes" or "no."

According to Time Magazine (Joe Klein, 10-15-06), Senator Obama's memoir Dreams From My Father (1995) is “the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician” [see page 3], but Dr. Jack Cashill argues in a series of articles that the Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers really ghostwrote Senator Obama's memoir.

Dr. Jack Cashill, the author of Hoodwinked: How Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture, reports today that the London Times listened to his theory that the Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers ghostwrote Senator Obama's memoir Dreams From My Father (1995).

The London Times has not written about this story, but they did listen. Maybe they will write about it later when they have a chance to evaluate the evidence.

Perhaps a reporter could ask Senator Obama if anyone helped him write Dreams, and if so, who?

Today Dr. Cashill has posted an article titled "London Times Inquires About Dreams Fraud" (11-1-08):

...What might just keep the London Times in this story is the transparency of Obama’s fraud. One does not have to be a forensic linguist to spot it. Indeed, my single best source to date has been a 39 year-old father of three who runs a small construction business in the Midwest.

Joe the Builder—given Joe the Plumber’s fate he prefers to remain anonymous--spotted at least two of the stories that bleed from the 1993 Ayers’ book “To Teach” into the 1995 Obama book “Dreams From My Father.”

Yesterday, I received an email from a Boston-area writer and composer, Jay Spencer, who suggested some other parallels between Obama’s “Dreams” and Ayers’ books that had evaded me. They smack even the casual reader in the face.

Remember that the young Ayers served as a merchant seaman, and although he has tried to put his ocean-going days behind him, the language of the sea will not let him go.

“I realized that no one else could ever know this singular experience,” Ayers writes of his maritime adventures. Yet curiously, much of this same nautical language flows through Obama’s earth-bound memoir.

Although there are no literal sea experiences in "Dreams," the following words, incredibly enough, appear in both Dreams and in Ayers’ work: fog, mist, ships, seas, boats, oceans, calms, captains, charts, first mates, storms, streams, wind, waves, barges, horizons, ports, panoramas, moorings, tides, currents, and things howling, fluttering, knotted, ragged, tangled, and murky.

This is well beyond coincidence. By contrast, only the words “current” and “tide” appear in my own semi-memoir on race, “Sucker Punch.”

Not surprisingly, two of the more conspicuous parallel structures that Spencer discovered involve elements that intrigue Ayers—water and language.

Writes Ayers in his [2001] memoir “Fugitive Days”: “The debates swam above and around and through us . . . . The confrontation in the [Student Union] flowed like a swollen river in to the teach-in, carrying me along the cascading waters from room to room, hall to hall, bouncing off boulders.”

Writes Obama in “Dreams”: “I heard all our voices begin to run together, the sound of three generations tumbling over each other like the currents of a slow-moving stream, my questions like rocks roiling the water, the breaks in memory separating the currents, but always the voices returning to that single course, a single story.”

...

Now, note the rhythm, cadence, and layered structure of the following two excerpts, both dealing with waves.
Writes Ayers in “A Kind And Just Parent”: “The hard ground is frozen through, the wintry waves upswept - all white and frosty - transposed in midcrash from furious motion to arctic glass. A fading, fragile sun offers no heat and precious little light to our dark smudge of a city nestled between Lake Michigan and the vast, flat plains stretching westward.”

Writes Obama in “Dreams”: “The trembling blue plane of the Pacific. The moss-covered cliffs and the cool rush of Manoa Falls, with its ginger blossoms and high canopies filled with the sounds of invisible birds. The North Shore's thunderous waves, crumbling as if in a slow-motion reel. The shadows off Pali's peaks; the sultry scented air.”

No one who has seen Obama’s earlier writing or paid heed to his casual speech could make a serious case that Obama wrote either of these passages. [See full text; See the series of Cashill's articles about the authorship of Dreams.]