“Professor Paul Kengor has
extensively researched the Chicago communists whose progeny include David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, and Barack Hussein Obama. Add the openly
Marxist, pro-communist Ayers, and you have many of the key players who put Obama into power.”
Why the Media Chose Not to
Hear When Trump Called Obama a Literary Fraud
By Jack Cashill
Barack
Obama, the writer, is stumbling again. Even the New York Times
acknowledges that the former president is "anguishing over the publication
date of his long-awaited memoir." Others are anguishing even
more than he.
"The
delay is wreaking havoc with print scheduling and of course budget
planning," an insider told me. "The enormous advance is
starting to raise concerns within the publisher. While Michelle's
book performed well, Obama needs to deliver the book and sales to make the
overall deal worthwhile."
This
is not the first time Obama failed to deliver on a book deadline. In
the summer of 1993, Simon & Schuster lost patience with Obama, canceled the
contract it had awarded him two years earlier, and demanded the advance
back. To get out of debt and save his future, Obama had to do
something.
Donald
Trump knows just what that something was, and he has said so in
public. At the time, I was paying close attention. In the
spring of 2011, I received a call from a fellow named Michael
Cohen. I did not recognize the name, nor did I know how Cohen got my
cell number. He explained that he was Trump's attorney, and I had
heard of Trump. Cohen wanted to know what I knew about Barack Obama's
origins.
I told
Cohen I had followed the birth certificate issue only from a distance and knew
no more than anyone else. I recommended instead that Trump focus on
the authorship issue. Obama claimed to have written his acclaimed
memoir, Dreams from My Father,
by himself. He was lying. He definitely had help, much of
it from Bill Ayers. This I deduced from my literary forensic work in
the summer and fall of 2008. In fact, my first
serious article on the same was published in the American Thinker.
Mainstream
biographer Christopher Andersen confirmed Ayers's involvement in his
Obama-friendly 2009 book, Barack
and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage. Andersen's
sources in Obama's Hyde Park neighborhood told him that Obama found himself
deeply in debt and "hopelessly blocked." At
"Michelle's urging," Obama "sought advice from his friend and
Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers."
What
attracted the Obamas, according to Andersen's sources, were "Ayers's
proven abilities as a writer" as evident in his 1993 book To Teach. Ayers himself
took credit for Dreams on
multiple occasions, usually, but not always, with a wink and a nod.
My
conversation with Cohen reaffirmed that Trump was the un-Obama, a creature of
his own creation: bold, bombastic, and as subtle as a truck
bomb. Unlike most on the right, Trump refused to be
intimidated. He was eager and ready to vet the nation's first
unvetted president. On April 15, 2011, Sean Hannity of Fox News gave
him the opportunity.
"I
heard he had terrible marks, and he ends up in Harvard," said Trump in his
inimitably artless style. "He wrote a book that was better than
Ernest Hemingway, but the second book was written by an average person."
"You
suspect Bill Ayers?" said Hannity.
"I
said, Bill Ayers wrote the book," Trump replied.
Trump
had made the claim earlier in a public forum. He doubled down on
Hannity's show. For all the outrage about Trump's questioning of
Obama's birth certificate, the mainstream media were noticeably silent about
Trump's much more tangible challenge to Obama's literary skills. To
this day, there has been negligible pushback to Trump's remarks about Dreams.
In the
New York Times article cited above, for instance, Glenn Thrush and Elaina Plott
had the opportunity to tie Trump's presumed "fixation" with Obama to
the authorship issue, given their reporting on Obama's literary
anguish. Instead, they tied the fixation to "a bizarre personal
animus and the politics of racial backlash exemplified by the birther lie."
Although
the left won't let the birther business die, if anyone told a "birther
lie," it was Obama. In 1991, likely to position himself as more
exotic than a garden-variety African-American, Obama claimed in a promotional
brochure put out by literary agency Acton & Dystel that he "was born
in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii."
Despite
media assertions otherwise, Trump, like most serious people labeled
"birther," never claimed that Obama was born in Kenya. In
September 2016, CNN ran an article headlined "14 of Trump's most
outrageous birther claims." On that same September day, ABC
News headlined a story "67 Times Donald Trump Tweeted About the 'Birther'
Movement." Despite
their best efforts, neither of these news services found a quote from Trump
claiming that Obama was born in Kenya. To be sure, Trump questioned
the legitimacy of the birth certificate and speculated on why Obama had taken
such pains to keep it under wraps, but he never went beyond speculation.
As
Christopher Andersen discovered, the media wanted nothing to do with the idea
that Ayers was Obama's muse, no matter who made the claim. At least
fifty publications reviewed his book, and not a one mentioned the six pages he
spent on the book's most newsworthy revelation.
Relentless
Obama-defender Chris Matthews interviewed Andersen on MSNBC's Hardball and did not address the
authorship issue. Said Matthews at the end of the interview, "You're
amazing, successful guy. You have a winning streak
here." If Matthews did not read the book, which is likely,
someone on his staff surely must have but chose not to notice the damning Ayers
revelation.
To
accuse Obama of being a literary fraud opens one up to the charge of
racism. This I can verify from experience. There is only
one reason, then, that the mainstream media passed on the opportunity to call
out Trump: the deep-seated fear that he was right.
///
Obama's General Flynn Problem
When the real message of
'Dreams from My Father' becomes clear.
May 11, 2020
Lloyd Billingsley
And the fact that there is no
precedent that anybody can find for someone who has been charged with perjury
just getting off scot-free. That’s the kind of stuff where you begin to get
worried that basic — not just institutional norms — but our basic understanding
of rule of law is at risk.
That was former president Barack Obama last
week after the DOJ dropped the case against former National Security Advisor Michael
Flynn, who had not been “charged with perjury,” or anything else. The FBI set
up Flynn in a perjury trap, with threats against his family, and that violated
both institutional norms and the rule of law. The 44th president set up the
whole thing in a January 5, 2017 Oval Office meeting with FBI boss James Comey,
vice president Joe Biden, CIA boss John Brennan, and other administration
officials. This revelation created a stir, but it’s really old news.
“POTUS wants to know everything we are doing,” Lisa Page texted to Peter Strzok, the FBI factotum in the
campaign against candidate and President Trump. To keep that operation going
once Trump took office, POTUS needed to take down Flynn. The January 5 meeting
was key but in May of 2017 a bigger bombshell would explode.
'Dreams from My Father' was not a memoir or an autobiography; it was instead, in
multitudinous ways, without any question a work of historical fiction. It featured
many true-to-life figures and a bevy of accurately described events that indeed
had occurred, but it employed the techniques and literary license of a novel,
and its most important composite character was the narrator himself.
This was the judgement of POTUS
44’s official biographer David Garrow, a Pulitzer Prize winner and acclaimed
author of Bearing the
Cross, The
FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr. and other books. Garrow let his
subject preview the manuscript of Rising
Star: The Making of Barack Obama and it’s easy to see why the
president maintained strong disagreements with the account.
Dreams from My Father was a novel, and Garrow was on to the composite
authorship. On page 1049 of Rising
Star, an unidentified reporter explains, “The whole Obama narrative
is built around this narrative that Obama and David Axelrod built, and, like
all stories, it’s not entirely true.” The president’s official biographer also
explained why the former Barry Soetoro needed a new narrative.
Dreams from My Father devotes more than 2,000 words to “Frank,” a happy-drunk poet
and counselor. In Rising
Star, Garrow correctly identified “Frank” as Frank Marshall Davis,
an African American Communist who spent most of his life defending all-white
Stalinist dictatorships. As Garrow explained, “Davis’ Communist background plus
his kinky exploits made him politically radioactive,” so if Barry was to become
a political player, Frank had to go.
In the best Stalinist
tradition, Frank disappeared from the audio version of Dreams, and did not
appear in the 2006 The
Audacity of Hope. In similar style, Frank does not appear
in The World As It
Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House, released in 2018 by
Iran deal promoter Ben Rhodes, or in Michelle Obama’s 2018 Becoming. Also missing
in both books is David Garrow’s Rising
Star: The Making of Barack Obama. The author, doubtless under
pressure from the former president, is now changing his tune.
In “Obama’s Airbrushed Dreams,” in the
March 2020 edition of The
Critic, Garrow transforms Dreams
from My Father back into a legitimate memoir and autobiography.
For further research, see Barack ‘em
Up: A Literary Investigation, and Yes I Con:
United Fakes of America. And adapt
what the former president said last week.
There is “no precedent” for a
composite character with a bogus autobiography becoming president of the United
States, yet it happened in 2008, and again in 2012. There was no precedent for
an outgoing president to deploy deep state operators to support his chosen
successor and attack her opponent, yet in 2016 the composite character did just
that.
In similar style, there was no
precedent for an outgoing president tasking the FBI to target a National
Security Advisor with a perjury trap to destroy his life and reputation. In
2017, the composite character sprung that trap, and in 2020 he tricks it out
with the lie that Flynn was charged with perjury. And if you like your plan,
you can keep it.
What the FBI did to Flynn was a
violation of institutional norms and the rule of law, but as Sebastian Gorka noted on
Saturday, “as of this writing, not one person has been charged with any crime
connected to the FBI’s use of its enormous power for political purposes. Not
one. Not Comey, not Strzok, not McCabe, not Lynch. No one.” So maybe the
composite character’s transformation of America is the new normal going
forward.
Back in 2016, his chosen
successor was former First Lady Hillary Clinton. In 2020, he endorses his
former vice president Joe Biden, so one might say the composite character is
still on the ballot.
As November 3 approaches, look
for more lies and obfuscation from the former president whose own biographer
proclaimed him a composite character in the historical fiction of Dreams from My Father.
As President Trump says, we’ll have to see what happens.
* * *
There is Nothing ‘Loony’ About Bill Ayers as Obama’s Muse
This past week several
people called my attention to a post by Scott Johnson on his
influential PowerLine blog that addressed the literary
relationship between Barack Obama and his radical friend, Bill
Ayers.
In the post Johnson spoke
of his high regard for David Garrow’s “staggeringly researched” 2017 Obama
biography, Rising Star. “Without resolving all mysteries,”
Johnson writes, “[Garrow’s] scholarship belies the notion that [Dreams from
My Father] was ghostwritten by Bill Ayers or other such collaborator.”
Johnson emailed Garrow to
follow up on the authorship question, and Garrow responded, “I don’t recall
exactly where the Bill Ayers [stuff] got started, but it, like the
Frank-Davis-as-father notion, is just beyond loony, ’cause Dreams is
already *in galleys* when Barack and Bill first get to know each other.”
I did not advance this
theory casually. I understood then what Obama biographer David Remnick would
later affirm, namely that my theory, “if ever proved true, or believed to be
true among enough voters, could have been the end of [Obama’s]
candidacy.”
My research on this
topic, aided by several helpful literary detectives, culminated in my 2011
book, published by Simon & Schuster, Deconstructing Obama. I
think I can safely assume Garrow has never read it. I would invite those
curious about the evidence to read the book or even to read the preliminary
article cited above.
That Garrow does not know
the source of a theory he dismisses offhand as “beyond loony” is,
unfortunately, altogether typical of establishment political writers. His
airy dismissal, in fact, reinforces the theme of my forthcoming book Unmasking
Obama: The Fight to Tell the True Story of a Failed Presidency.
In the book, I use the
phrase “samizdat” -- Russian for underground press -- to describe the loose
coalition of conservative blogs, online publications, talk radio shows, and
legal monitors such as Judicial Watch that challenged the Left -- and,
occasionally, the “responsible” right -- for control of the Obama narrative.
For eight-plus years, the
samizdat broke virtually every major unflattering story about Obama and his
presidency, some of which the major media grudgingly confirmed, some of which
they continue to suppress. In the book I tell how the individuals in question managed
to break these stories out. In every case, as you might imagine, the samizdat
journalists were met with condescension, if not outright contempt, from the
major media.
Obama’s biographers were
among the more contemptuous. Curiously, the four major biographers are all
named David -- Mendell, Remnick, Maraniss, and Garrow. The last three are
Pulitzer Prize winners. To his credit, Garrow was the only one of the four who
refused to prop up what Remnick called Obama’s “signature appeal: the use of
the details of his own life as a reflection of a kind of multicultural ideal.”
The story Obama told
about his happy multicultural family at the conventions was pure fiction.
According to Garrow, Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, and Barack Obama Sr. “never
chose to live together at any time following the onset of Ann’s
pregnancy.” Garrow quotes approvingly one unnamed scholar to the effect
that Obama Sr. was no more than “a sperm donor in his son’s life.” All
of this was common knowledge in the samizdat as early as 2008, but it came as
news to many of Garrow’s readers in 2017.
Like his fellow Davids,
however, Garrow has no use for information gleaned from the samizdat,
especially information I introduced. On the subject of the Obama poem “Pop,”
for instance, Garrow notes, “Most commentators presumed that Obama had written
about his grandfather, Stan Dunham, not Frank Marshall Davis.”
This much was true, but
“hostile critics,” Garrow continues, insisted the poem was about Obama’s
bi-sexual Communist mentor, Davis. The “hostile critics” Garrow cites in the
footnotes are historian Paul Kengor and me.
Instead of giving me
credit for being the first to decode “Pop,” Garrow describes me in the footnote
as “someone who is cited with the greatest reluctance.” What I did to deserve
this slight is left unsaid, especially since Garrow knows I nailed the identity
of “Pop” two years before anyone in the mainstream media did, including the
other Davids.
As to Bill Ayers’s
involvement in the writing of Dreams, Garrow does not even deign to
dismiss the possibility. He has a discovery of his own, namely that outside literary
help came from a law school buddy of Obama’s named Rob Fisher. This is an
important find if for no other reason than it undercuts Obama’s 2008 boast to a
crowd of schoolteachers, "I've written two books. I actually wrote them
myself."
An established economist
before starting law school, Fisher became good friends with Obama at
Harvard. There, they co-authored a manuscript that perhaps prophetically
was never finished. One completed chapter dealt with the always sexy topic of
plant closings.
“The quest is to develop
guidelines,” they wrote, “on how politically progressive movements can use the
market mechanism to promote social goals.” Garrow quotes the unfinished
manuscript extensively. Its style is wonkish and ungainly throughout.
Sentences like the
following suggest that one author wrote as awkwardly as the other: “While
Yuppies can afford the expensive frivolities provided by The Sharper Image,
others receive insufficient nutrition to allow their minds to develop
properly.”
I do not question Fisher’s
involvement. Obama needed all the help he could get. What I do question is
Fisher’s ability to provide the poetry, the rage, the postmodern rhetoric, and
the Homeric structure that inspired Oona King of the London Times to
overpraise Dreams as “a beautifully written
personal memoir steeped in honesty.”
Garrow seems to dismiss
my thesis for no more substantial reason than his belief that Dreams was
already in galley form when “Barack and Bill first get to know each other.”
Garrow traces the first meeting of these two gentlemen to a breakfast some time
in early 1995. He bases this timing on the suspiciously well-remembered account
of a common friend who claims to have introduced them.
Garrow, however, has a
problem with chronology. He writes that Obama took six weeks off from his law
firm job “in late spring 1994” to finish Dreams. He needed time to
complete the book’s third section, the one on Africa. Garrow claims Obama
worked largely from letters he sent in 1988 while in Kenya and retrieved from
his girlfriend at the time, Sheila Jager.
David Maraniss told a
different story in his 2012 bio. According to Maraniss’s source, Crown editor
Henry Ferris, Obama made an additional trip to Kenya for further research.
Obama confirmed this trip when interviewed by Marannis. Garrow makes no mention
of this mysterious trip, which would have taken place in 1994. No one else does
either. Like much in his life, Obama appears to have made it up.
A more likely possibility
is that Obama lied to Ferris about the trip. Instead of going to Kenya, Obama
may have contented himself with going to the local library and pillaging the
memoirs of longtime Kenya resident Kuki Gallmann.
This is the theory proposed by
tireless researcher Shawn Glasco. He was intrigued by the many words and
phrases in Dreams that also appeared in Gallmann’s book, African
Nights, which was published in 1994. These include Baobab [a tree], bhang
[cannabis], boma [an enclosure], samosa [a fried snack], shamba [a farm field],
liana [a vine], tilapia [a fish], kanga [a sheet of fabric], shuka [decorative
sashes], and many, many more.
Based on Garrow’s
imprecise timeline, Obama flew to New York to hand the completed book off to
Ferris no later than early June 1994. In other words, he spent six weeks to
finish the last third of the 400-page book between “late spring” 1994 and early
June 1994, which is, in fact, late spring.
In his 2009 book, Barack
and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage, celebrity biographer
Christopher Andersen offers a much more credible account of how Obama managed
to finish a project that hung over his head ever since he finished law school.
According to Andersen’s
two sources in Chicago’s Hyde Park, Obama found himself deeply in debt and
“hopelessly blocked.” At “Michelle’s urging,” Obama “sought advice from his
friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers.” Noting that Obama had already taped
interviews with many of his relatives, both African and American, Andersen
elaborated, “These oral histories, along with his partial manuscript and a
trunkload of notes were given to Ayers.” Andersen’s six-page account makes
sense, logically and chronologically, but Garrow fully ignores it.
Andersen is a
best-selling, mainstream author. He even appeared on MSNBC’s Hardball to
discuss the book. Said Chris Matthews at the end of the interview, “You‘re
amazing, successful guy. You have a winning streak here.” Matthews likely
did not read the book. Garrow did read it and cites the book in the footnotes
but, oddly, not on the subject of authorship.
Garrow nonetheless offers
some valuable insights into the Ayers-Obama relationship, insights that I
believe strengthen my thesis. Once Ayers helped launch Obama’s political career
in 1995, Garrow writes, “Barack and Michelle began to see a great deal more of
not only Bill and Bernardine [Dohrn] but also their three closest friends,
Rashid and Mona Khalidi and Carole Travis."
According to Garrow, the
three couples attended "almost nightly dinners” together up until the time
Obama ran for the U.S. Senate in 2004. This information, of course, makes
complete hash out of Obama’s infamous claim during a 2008 debate that Ayers was
“just a guy who lives in my neighborhood.”
Khalidi, a radical
Palestinian, begins his 2004 book, Resurrecting Empire, with a
tribute to his own literary muse. “First, chronologically and in other ways,”
writes Khalidi, “comes Bill Ayers.” Unlike the calculating Obama, Khalidi had
no reason to be coy about this relationship. He elaborates, “Bill was
particularly generous in letting me use his family’s dining room table to do
some writing for the project.” Khalidi did not need the table. He
had one of his own. He needed help from the skilled neighborhood editor and
writer who obviously could and would provide it.
There is nothing “loony”
about Bill Ayers helping a good friend finish his book. That is what Ayers did.
He was grooming Obama for higher office and was savvy enough to keep his
writing relationship with Obama under wraps. Being a friend of a terrorist,
Ayers knew, would not exactly help Obama’s career.
Jack Cashill’s most
recent book, a political thriller called “The Hunt” co-authored with Mike
McMullen, is available wherever you buy books. For a signed collector’s
edition, see www.TheHuntBook.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment