Bill Ayers helped Obama write 'Dreams'?

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=110784

Author confirms Bill Ayers helped Obama write 'Dreams'
New release on president's marriage verifies work of WND's Jack Cashill pointing to ex-terrorist's role
September 23, 2009
Art Moore
© 2009 WorldNetDaily

Confirming the literary detective work of WND columnist Jack Cashill prior to the 2008 election, author Christopher Andersen says in a newly released book that former domestic terrorist William Ayers helped Barack Obama write the president's highly acclaimed memoir "Dreams from My Father."

Obama's 1995 book won the 2006 Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Album and drew praise from Time magazine, which called it "the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician."

But since July 2008, Cashill has unveiled in nearly two dozen columns, summarized here, his compelling evidence that the unrepentant co-founder of the radical Weather Underground group – dismissed by Obama during the campaign as "just a guy who lives in my neighborhood" – shaped and refined the book with his exceptional writing skill and radical ideas.

Cashill, who acquired a copy of Andersen's new book today, told WND the author "lays out the scenario just as I envisioned it."

Andersen, in "Barack and Michelle: Portrait of a Marriage," writes that Obama was faced with a deadline with the Time Books division of Random House to submit his manuscript after already having canceled a contract with Simon & Schuster. Confronted with the threat of a second failure, his wife, Michelle, suggested he seek the help of "his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers."

Obama had taped interviews with relatives to flesh out his family history, and those "oral histories, along with a partial manuscript and a truckload of notes, were given to Ayers," writes Andersen.

The author quotes a neighbor in the Hyde Park area of Chicago where Obama and Ayers lived, who says of the two, "Everyone knew they were friends and that they worked on various projects together."

"It was no secret. Why would it be? People liked them both," the neighbor said, according to Andersen.

Andersen also has written "marriage portraits" of George and Laura Bush, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and John and Jackie Kennedy. Among his other books are "Somewhere in Heaven: The Remarkable Love Story of Dana and Christopher Reeve," "Barbra: The Way She Is," "Sweet Caroline: Last Child of Camelot" and "After Diana: William, Harry, Charles, and the Royal House of Windsor."

Andersen writes:

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 writing.

Andersen concludes, "Thanks to help from the veteran writer Ayers, Barack would be able to submit a manuscript to his editors at Times Books."

Andersen relied on inside sources, quite possibly Michelle Obama, to describe how "Dreams" was published, Cashill says. Andersen cites Cashill as a source, but Cashill points out in a fresh WND column today that Andersen "clearly has access to inside information that I did not have."

"His level of detail on the mechanics of the transmission goes beyond anything that I could have discovered on my own," Cashill writes.

Cashill pointed out in a column last year that in contrast to "Dreams," the Obama writing samples unearthed before 1995 "are pedestrian and uninspired."

"There is no precedent for this kind of literary transformation," Cashill wrote. "It is as if a high 90s golfer suddenly showed up with his PGA card – with no known practice rounds in between."

The evidence Cashill had gathered to that point, he said, "severely tests Obama's claim of a superficial relationship with the self-declared 'communist' Ayers. This appears to be a conscious and consequential deception."

'That's a myth'

Cashill noted in a column in May this year that Ayers was confronted at a Baltimore book-signing by a Washington Times online editor with the question of his alleged role in Obama's book.

In the encounter, which was captured on video, the Times' Kerry Picket asked Ayers if he had received any feedback from Obama on Ayers' latest book, "Race Course: Against White Supremacy."

Ayers asked rhetorically, "Why would I?"

Picket then asked, "Considering that you may have had a collaboration with 'Dreams of My Father.'"

Ayers' body language changed abruptly. Turning away from Picket, he replied curtly, "I never had a collaboration, no."

"No?" she persisted.

"That's a myth," said Ayers, ending the conversation.

Literary cabal

In an interview last night with the Fox News Channel's Sean Hannity, Andersen was asked to comment on his assertion that Ayers helped Obama write "Dreams." Hannity pointed to Andersen's observation that "the literary devices and themes" of the book "bear a jarring similarity to Ayers own writings."

"They were good friends," Andersen affirmed, recalling that during the campaign Obama denied that fact.

"There was a literary cabal there in Chicago," Andersen continued. "They were all giving each other quotes, blurbs to promote their respective books."

Hannity concluded rhetorically: "So (Obama) lied to the American people."

Andersen appeared hesitant to concur, but conceded, "Well, you know, I think, well, let's face it, during that campaign I think he was doing some backpedaling, I'll be honest. And I think that, you know, Michelle probably recommended that he not emphasize the relationship with Ayers."

Forensic evidence

Last fall, Cashill commissioned an independent scientific comparative analysis of writings by Obama and Ayers to determine whether Ayers had a significant role in the writing of "Dreams."

Cashill reported at least four different stylometric analysts supported his extensive forensic evidence.

His experts included university professors from the U.S. and England in the statistical analysis of authorship, systems engineers, writers and Ph.D. literary analysts. Most, particularly professors at public universities, asked that their names not be revealed.

One analyst said it was possible Ayers served as a "book doctor," drastically rewriting work Obama already had done.

Game changer

Cashill conjectures that the apparent revelation of Ayers part in Obama's book would have changed the outcome of the 2008 election.

He recalls that Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC's "Hardball, mocked the Republicans' 2008 vice presidential candidate, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, for needing a collaborator for her book, because "she can't write."

Cashill comments in his column today that as "the Obama-as-Milli Vanilli story unfolds, Matthews and those willfully blind souls like him are in for a shock."

"To admit that Obama needed a collaborator would have undercut his campaign for president," Cashill says, "and to reveal the name of that collaborator would have ended it."

Beast of the Month - September 2008

Beast of the Month - September 2008
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Obama Foreign Policy Guru

"I yam an anti-Christ..."
John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) of The Sex Pistols, "Anarchy in the UK"

"Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss"
The Who, "Won't Get Fooled Again"

Those evil Russians. With their mastermind Vladimir Putin in charge (using "President" Dmitry Medvedev as his front-man puppet) those nasty Soviets invaded the noble, peace-loving nation of Georgia, just so they could steal land from a thriving little democracy that just wanted to be left alone.

At least that's how it’s been portrayed in the press.

Okay, maybe Russia isn't the most sympathetic "victim" in world affairs, and Putin has proven himself to be quite the would-be dictator. But the story as it's been presented just doesn't add up. Let's start with the issue of who attacked who first. In fact, it was Georgia, who bombarded the province of South Ossetia unilaterally. The mainstream media even admits this truth, but then argues that since South Ossetia is part of Georgia sovereign nation, the attack was legitimate. Of course, this ignores that South Ossetia long has had secessionist desires from Georgia so it could reunite with the Russian homeland. Indeed, a 2006 referendum in which voter turnout was 95 percent showed that 99 percent of South Ossetians supported their continued quasi-independence from Georgia, a landslide of near-universal proportions. 34 international observers monitored the election, and none disputed the validity of the results. This shouldn't be a surprise: since 1992, Russian peacekeeper have remained in the province under agreement with Georgia to protect its desired independence from the rest of the nation.

In attacking South Ossetia, Georgia went after the city of Tskhinvali, which has no military targets and is a residential and industrial center home to 30,000 people. The majority of these people, incidentally, have both Russian citizenship and passports. The massive bombing and shelling of these people can rightly be deemed a war crime, and according to Russia, over 2,000 people were murdered in the massacre. Given this provocation, Russia did what any superpower nation would do under similar circumstances: sent its own military to repel the assault and defend its own citizens.

(This, of course, leads to the ultimate absurdity of the situation: Team USA feigns outrage at supposed Russian violation of sovereignty of a hostile nation situated right at its border, while the invasion of the Iraqi nation half-way across the planet continues in its sixth year.)

Even in the Western media, Putin (long made out to be a Bond-like super-villain) and Medvedev (long mocked as Putin's poodle) didn't lose the most PR-wise, since they didn't have far to fall. It was Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili, who long had been championed as a supposed leader devoted to democracy. At best, he appeared to be a sniveling opportunist who falsely assumed that Russia wouldn't respond to its attack, or that NATO would defend it if Russia did. At worst, he was revealed as a political charlatan who uses charm and Western propaganda to hide his power-hungry actions, actions which have made him increasingly unpopular in Georgia. (And as far as NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine goes, does anyone really believe that defending a nation on the border of Russia with the NATO pact is a good idea, even ignoring what an arrogant buffoon Saakashvili is in particular?)

Still, focusing on Saakashvili misses the big picture of who is in charge here. After all, if Medvedev is Putin's puppet, so is Mikhail S. to NATO and the West. (In fact, Saakashvili is such a tool, it is safe to assume the Bush Team greenlighted the South Ossetia invasion.) And in particular, Saakashvili is beholden to one man: Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Konformist Beast of the Month.

Brzezinski, for those unaware, was founding executive director in 1973 of the Trilateral Commission, the conspiracy bugaboo long alleged to be the major not-so-secret player in international affairs. Created by David Rockefeller, the TLC got together leaders of the US, Western Europe and Japan (hence the "trilateral" part of its name) to coordinate foreign policy plans in secret. Jimmy Carter became a member, and when he was elected President, he named Z-man as his National Security Advisor.

Nearly twenty-eight years after his presidency, Carter is known for being a warm, snuggly Nobel Peace Prize winner, but whatever fuzzy, peace-loving tendencies Jimmy had, Zbig didn't share them. He was the decided hawk in the Democratic establishment, and he is best described as the Democratic Party's answer to Henry Kissinger. Nor is he particularly fond of democracy, as the 1974 TLC report "The Crisis of Democracy" revealed: it argued the masses had too much influence over government and economics, influence that needed to be curtailed.

How to curtail that democratic influence on government? The best way, it seems, is by creating faux-populist leaders who would dazzle the public, then let the same old club of powerful insiders run the show behind the curtain. Jimmy Carter was the first of these in 1976, followed by Ronald Reagan in 1980, Clinton in 1992 and GWB in 2000. All of these candidates feigned that they were outsiders during the campaign, but then mainly served sectors of the establishment after occupying the White House. (Bush Sr. was the solitary admitted insider after he won in '88.) This leads to this year's election, where the Democrat's have Mr. "Hope and Change" Barack Obama battling the Republican's "Maverick" John McCain. Do we see a pattern?

Of course, as far as ties to Brzezinski go, Barack Obama is far deeper than McCain, something heavily detailed by author Webster Tarpley in the recent political expose Obama - The Postmodern Coup. Zbig's support of Obama turned covert after Brzezinski became publicly critical of Israel and its lobby. As Obama would explain in February, "He's not one of my key advisers. I've had lunch with him once. I've exchanged e-mails with him maybe three times. He came to Iowa to introduce me for a speech on Iraq." (If this line of argument sounds familiar, it's the same one he used for his deep ties to financial swindler Tony Rezko and former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers.) But until the Israeli controversy, Brzezinski was featured prominently as a chief Obama foreign policy advisor, a de facto position that has likely remained the same.

This may not be for the better. While the GOP has been taken over by the destructively incompetent neocons, at least even George W. Bush was smart enough to know that wars in the Middle East are less dangerous than an overt battle with either Russia or China (which is why he wisely ducked a major confrontation with Russia over the Georgia crisis.)

Don't take The Konformist's word for it. Brzezinski laid it all out in his 1998 book The Grand Chessboard, where he argued the 21st century would turn into a major battle between Russia, China and the West for control of natural resources, in particular oil. Ten years later, his book looks more like a blueprint than a prediction, although the battle between the West and both Russia and China still remains extremely cold. But that could change: both Georgia's Saakashvili and Ukraine's Viktor Yushchenko (two former Soviet Republic's with important strategic locations in the battle for access to Caspian Sea oil between the West and Russia) are presidents whose campaigns were backed by the brains of Brzezinski and the funds of George Soros. Both were rushed in on a wave of gushing populist frenzy, followed by increasing unpopularity as they followed policies of neoliberal economics and provoking the Russian bear in foreign policy. That the same recipe behind Saakashvili and Yushchenko is being used for the Obamahead cult shouldn't be too comforting.

But so this doesn't get confused as an advertisement for the McCain campaign, Mr. Maverick has as his foreign policy guru Randy Scheunemann, a frothing neocon who for four years was a paid foreign lobbyist of (drum roll please) the nation of Georgia. It is important to note that after the Georgia-Russia conflict began, McCain immediately was far more forceful in bellicose anti-Russian posturings than Obama. No surprise for the one 2008 candidate more tied to Bush's Iraq War than any other.

All of which suggests that, when it comes to foreign policy, 2008 is a rigged game. Obama, after feigning to be the "antiwar candidate" during the Democratic primary, has shed all such pretensions as November approaches. To his credit, McCain has never pretended otherwise than to be a Commander-in-Chief President. Either way, we're looking at four more years of Afghanistan, Iraq and possibly new misadventures in Iran and, yes, Russia. Meet the new boss...

In any case, we salute Zbigniew Brzezinski as Beast of the Month. Congratulations, and keep up the great work, Z-man!!!

Sources:

Adams, Cecil. "Is the Trilateral Commission the Secret Organization that Runs the World?" The Straight Dope 6 November 1987 <http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/524/is-the-trilateral-commission-the-secret-organization-that-runs-the-world>.

Brzezinski, Zbigniew. The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. New York: Basic Books, 1998.

Judis, John B. "Neo-McCain." New Republic 16 October 2006 <http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=23c3a0ff-9d55-4d28-a94e-0b0e09e26505>.

Scheer, Robert. "Georgia War a Neocon Election Ploy?" Truthdig 12 August 2008 <http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080812_georgia_war_a_neocon_election_ploy/>.

Smith, Ben. "Obama Adviser Worries Israel Supporters." Politico 12 September 2007 <http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0907/5783.html>.

Sweet, Lynn. "Obama Assures Jewish Leaders on Religion, Israel Stance." Chicago Sun-Times 25 February 2008 <http://www.suntimes.com/news/sweet/811251,CST-NWS-sweet25.article>.

Tarpley, Webster Griffin. "Brzezinski's Georgia Puppets Attack Russia - WWIII In Sight." Rense.com 11 August 2008 <http://rense.com/general82/indt.htm>.

Tarpley, Webster Griffin. Obama - The Postmodern Coup. Joshua Tree: Progressive Press, 2008.

Traynor, Ian. "Georgia Crisis: Medvedev Promises to Guarantee Any Vote by Rebel States to Break with Tbilisi." The Guardian 15 August 2008 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/15/russia.georgia>.

Whitney, Mike. "Putin's Winning Hand." Information Clearing House 16 August 2008 <http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20535.htm>.

Obama's First Appointment - An Ominous Portent

http://rense.com/general84/bark.htm

Obama's First Appointment -
An Ominous Portent
Barky's First Choices - No Seat At The Table For Labor And The Third World
By Webster G. Tarpley
11-7-8

WASHINGTON DC -- Obama's first appointments have confirmed the grimmest suspicions about the new regime.

The naming of the vicious thug Rahm Emanuel as the new Martin Bormann of the regime has caused much consternation, even among the netroots or nutroots crowd over at the Daily Kos. Rahm is a former member of the Israeli Defense Force whose ruling passion is that he is a warmonger. In 2006, when Rahm ran the Democratic congressional money machine, he made sure that only warmongers committed to the open-ended prosecution of the Afghan and Iraq wars could get any Democratic Party financing for their races. Many contests were lost as a result. A tragic case was that of grass-roots antiwar activist Christine Cegelis of Ohio, who was defeated in the Democratic primary by Tammy Duckworth, an Iraq war veteran who advocated endless hostilities there. Duckworth lost to the Republican by several points. If the $300,000 Rahm gave Duckworth had been shared with anti-war candidate Bob Bowen in Florida, a Democratic seat could easily have been added. Rahm is also a product of the filthy and corrupt Illinois bipartisan Combine, which I have described in my books.

A co-chair of the transition team is Valerie Jarrett, who served as Barky's travelling schoolmarm during the campaign. Jarrett also comes from the Daley wing of the Illinois combine. She has provided graft and related support for Michelle Obama's foundation-funded operations. Jarrett is also an integral part of the Chicago housing graft community, a region also inhabited by Barky's original godfather, the convicted felon and thief Tony Rezko. Jarrett is discussed in detail in my Obama biography. She is joined on the transition team by John Podesta, a Clinton-era retread who worked for Sen. Tom Daschle, the senator from Citibank, the biggest employer in South Dakota. Podesta also worked for Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, a close personal friend of Weatherman terrorist bombers Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.

Another Daschle-Citibank retread is transition co-chair Tom Rouse, who was the chief of staff for Daschle when he was the weakest Democratic majority leader in recent memory, surrendering to Bush on point after point. Chief strategist remains David Axelrod of the corrupt Illinois Combine, who was taught his mindbending skills in the infamous "1313" Rockefeller-funded think tank at the University of Chicago.

BANKERS ONLY: NO VOICE FOR LABOR, RETIREES, SMALL BUSINESS, WOMEN

Obama's transitional council of economic advisers is also notable. The dominant figures here are all Wall Street derivatives merchants and their quackademic apologists and politician clients. The key people here are plutocrat Warren Buffet, Obama moneybags and Hyatt heiress Penny Pritzker, Goldman Sachs-Citibank alum Robert Rubin, woman-hating thug and failed Harvard president Larry Summers, Google spook Eric Schmidt, and Roger Ferguson, the former vice president of the Federal Reserve board. The most obscene is Trilateral Commission bigwig Paul Adolf Volcker, the bringer of the 22% prime rate of 1981 and the destroyer of the US indsutrial base. What is truly notable about this list is that there is not one single labor leader. No Sweeney of the AFL-CIO, no Hoffa of the Teamsters, no UAW, not even the unsavory Andy Stern of the SIEU, all big Obama backers. Note the difference to the New Deal, when labor reps were indispensable. With Barky, only derivatives monsters and their stooges need apply. Also notable by their absence are leaders of women's groups, small business associations, the congressional black caucus, retirees groups like the AARP ­ there is not even a token face representing any of these groups, all of which have a vital interest in economic policy. Read the ill omens if you have eyes to see. The Obama regime is shaping up as of the bankers, by the bankers, for the bankers. This is not the FDR New Deal ­ this is the Mussolini fascist corporate state.

WASHINGTON ECONOMIC CONFERENCE: THE DERIVATIVES BLOC VS. THE ANTI- DERIVATIVES BLOC

We are also told that Barky has been on the phone to foreign leaders about matters of economic. Let us read the tea leaves: whom did Barky call? Here is the list: Australia, the British, Canada, France, Germany, Israel, Japan, Mexico, and South Korea.

Notice now who is NOT on the list. Start with the great world powers who have been snubbed: Russia and China, both of whom are bigger holders of US Treasury bonds than most of those who are on the list. Saudi Arabia, who might have needed reassurance that Barky is not a commie, are also snubbed. Forget ideology, and behold the ineptitude. Most glaring of all is the lack of any phone call to a leading third world or developing sector country, other than Mexico, which is a branch of NAFTA. No calls were made to Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, Nigeria, Algeria, India or a long list of other leading states. Nobody in Africa, nobody in south Asia, and nobody in South America got a call. Not even those who will be coming to the pseudo-Bretton Woods conference set for Washington later this month. The best we can hope for regarding that conference is that it end in a stalemate, dividing the world between a US-UK dominated derivatives bloc and a Brazil-India- Russia-China-South Africa anti-derivatives bloc interested in real physical commodity production, not fictitious capital.

Obama, in summation, is acting just like the abject puppet of the Wall Street derivatives merchants and warmongers which we have argued him to be.

Webster G. Tarpley is the author of Obama ­- The Postmodern Coup: The Making of a Manchurian Candidate, and Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biography, both available from amazon.com.

Obama's book blurb for Ayers

http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=78640

Tuesday, October 21, 2008
See it with your own eyes: Obama's book blurb for Ayers
As state senator, presidential candidate praised work of former leader of Weather Underground
October 20, 2008
WorldNetDaily

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama wrote a review of domestic terrorist Bill Ayers' book in 1997, calling it "searing" and "timely," according to a blogger who tracked down the original printed version of the endorsement since that was before the publication in which it appeared was digitized.

According to the blogger at Zombietime.com, Obama, who was an up-and-coming state senator at the time, endorsed Ayers' book called "A Kind and Just Parent: Children of Juvenile Court."

In the short review on Dec. 21, 1997, Obama in the Chicago Tribune calls Ayers' book, "A searing and timely account of the juvenile court system, and the courageous individuals who rescue hope from despair."

The documentation calls into question Obama's repeated efforts to distance himself from Ayers, who boasted as recently as 2001 of trying to bomb various federal buildings such as the Pentagon and wishing he had done more.

Obama has described Ayers and someone who lived in his neighborhood and with whom in worked on a school project, but he's denied any close link.

"I find it very hard — no, make that impossible — to believe that Barack Obama had 'no idea' who William Ayers really was, or that he had a past as a notorious domestic terrorist (as Obama's campaign has claimed) while serving on panels with Ayers and simultaneously praising Ayers' book in a major newspaper," the blogger wrote.

The blogger described tracking down the book endorsement.

"I had seen mentions of the existence of this review in a very few media outlets, including CNN, National Review, American Spectator, and a handful of others. But because the review was published before the Chicago Tribune began digitizing and archiving its articles online, there was no direct Web link to the review itself — only citations of it. So, out of curiosity, I took it upon myself to visit a library in San Francisco, and using the library's Lexis-Nexis access and its archive of microfilm versions of major newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, I finally tracked down a copy of the actual review itself," Zombietime said.

The endorsement came in part of the Chicago Tribune column called "Mark My Word," where Chicago leaders praised their favorite current books.

Ayers book had just recently been published by Beacon Press.

The blogger noted that Ayers, in his book, also mentioned Obama.

Ayers' wrote: "Our neighbors include Muhammad Ali, former mayor Eugene Sawyer, poets Gwendolyn Brooks and Elizabeth Alexander, and writer Barack Obama. Minister Louis Farrakhan lives a block from our home and adds, we think, a unique dimension to the idea of 'safe neighborhood watch': the Fruit of Islam, his security force, has an eye on things twenty-four-hours a day."

"So there's no question they knew each other," the blogger wrote.

On the Zombietime forum page, one participant wrote, "Obama is not running to change government he's running for overthrow government. Ayers wins."

"The more time that passes, the more obvious it becomes that the links between Ayers and Obama are multiple, and that Obama had to know about Ayers' criminal past," said another. "It certainly looks like he's hiding something."

On a Boston Globe forums page, the readers were concerned not so much about the relationship with Ayers, but Obama's repeated efforts to distance himself from Ayers.

"Personally I don't care too much about him associating with Ayers, the 60s were a turbulent time though bombing your own country is despicable; it bothers me a great deal that a presidential candidate can flat out lie and get away with it," wrote one contributor. "Just because many Americans are tired of Bush shouldn't mean we accept old style politics and deceit, but it seems to be the case this election."

The review came about the time, as WND reported, Obama's wife, Michelle, organized a university event in which she invited her husband and former radical Ayers to serve on a panel discussion about whether child murderers should be tried as adults.

Both Barack Obama and Ayers served on the side that opposed treating offending minors as adults.

Michelle Obama at the time was the University of Chicago's associate dean of student services and director of the college's Community Service Center, which sponsored the juvenile detention discussion Nov. 20, 1997.

She told the university's student newspaper she hoped the panel discussion would open a dialogue between members of the college and the broader Chicago community.

"We know that issues like juvenile justice impact the city of Chicago, this nation and – directly or indirectly – this campus. This panel gives students a chance to hear about the juvenile justice system not only on a theoretical level, but from the people who have experienced it," she said.

Panel leaders invited by Michelle Obama included her husband, who taught law at the university; Ayers, who was a university education professor; and four other speakers who had experience with Chicago's juvenile detention system.

Barack Obama was billed as a leader "who is working to combat legislation that would put more juvenile offenders into the adult system."

Ayers, promoting the panel event, told the student newspaper, "We should call a child a child. A 13-year-old who picks up a gun isn't suddenly an adult. We have to ask other questions: How did he get the gun? Where did it come from?"

During his Weathermen days, Ayers once famously commented, "Kill all the rich people. ... Bring the revolution home. Kill your parents."

In an ABC News interview, Obama described Ayers as "guy who lives in my neighborhood, who's a professor of English in Chicago who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from. He's not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis."

But several other blogs earlier raised questions about the links between the two men. The Sweetness and Light blog, which first reported on Michelle Obama's panel event, commented "we all must be mistaken, since we have been repeatedly reassured that Mr. Ayers 'was just a guy who lived in the Obamas' neighborhood.'"

The two men also worked in 1994 on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, founded by Ayers.

Also in 1995, the first organizing meeting for Obama's state senatorial campaign reportedly was held in Ayers's apartment. In a widely circulated article, WND first reported Obama served on the board of the Wood's Fund, a liberal Chicago nonprofit, alongside Ayers from 1999 to Dec. 11, 2002, according to the Fund's website. Tax filings showed Obama received compensation of $6,000 per year for his service in 1999 and 2000.

Ayers' wife, Bernadine Dohrn, also has served on panels with Obama. Dohrn, once on the FBI's Top 10 Most Wanted List, was described by J. Edgar Hoover as the "most dangerous woman in America." Ayers and Dohrn raised the son of Weathermen terrorist Kathy Boudin, who was serving a sentence for participating in a 1981 murder and robbery that left four people dead.

As WND reported, an FBI report claims Dohrn built and planted the bomb that killed a San Francisco police officer in 1970.

Ayers, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has admitted to involvement in the bombings of U.S. governmental buildings in the 1970s. The charges against him were dropped in 1974, however, because of prosecutorial misconduct, including illegal surveillance.

But Ayers told the New York Times in an interview released Sept. 11, 2001, "I don't regret setting bombs. I feel we didn't do enough."

Who Wrote Dreams From My Father?

http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/10/who_wrote_dreams_from_my_fathe_1.html

October 09, 2008
Who Wrote Dreams From My Father?
By Jack Cashill

Prior to 1990, when Barack Obama contracted to write Dreams From My Father, he had written very close to nothing. Then, five years later, this untested 33 year-old produced what Time Magazine has called -- with a straight face -- "the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician."

The public is asked to believe Obama wrote Dreams From My Father on his own, almost as though he were some sort of literary idiot savant. I do not buy this canard for a minute, not at all. Writing is as much a craft as, say, golf. To put this in perspective, imagine if a friend played a few rounds in the high 90s and then a few years later, without further practice, made the PGA Tour. It doesn't happen.

And yet, given the biases of the literary establishment, no reviewer of note has so much as questioned Obama's role in the writing, then or now. As the New York Times gushed, Obama was "that rare politician who can write . . . and write movingly and genuinely about himself." These accolades matter all the more because Obama has built his political persona around his presumably superior intellect, Dreams being exhibit A.

Shy of a confession by those involved, I will not be able to prove conclusively that Obama did not write this book. As shall be seen, however, there are only two real possibilities: one is that Obama experienced a near miraculous turnaround in his literary abilities; the second is that he had major editorial help, up to and including a ghostwriter.

The weight of the evidence overwhelming favors the latter conclusion and strongly suggests who that ghostwriter is. In that this remains something of a work in progress, I am willing to test my hypothesis against any standard of proof and appreciate any and all good leads.

In my career in advertising and publishing, I have reviewed the portfolios of a thousand professional writers, all of them crowded with writing samples, but only a handful of these writers would have been capable of having a written a book as stylish as Dreams. I have also written a book on intellectual fraud, Hoodwinked, and examined any number of bogus biographies that excited the literary left to the point of complicity, Edward Said's and Rigoberta Menchu's prominent among them, Menchu winning a Nobel Prize for hers. Obama's ascent seems to follow a century-old pattern.

Tracing Obama's literary ascent is complicated by what Politico.com calls a "scant paper trail." That trail begins at Occidental College whose literary magazine published two of Obama's poems -- "Pop" and "Underground" -- in 1981. Obama calls it some "very bad poetry," and he does not sell himself short. From "Underground":

Under water grottos, caverns
Filled with apes
That eat figs.
Stepping on the figs
That the apes
Eat, they crunch.
The apes howl, bare
Their fangs, dance . . .

It would be another decade before Obama had anything in print and this an edited, unsigned student case comment in the Harvard Law Review unearthed by Politico. Attorneys who reviewed the piece for Politico described it as "a fairly standard example of the genre."

Of note, Politico reporters Ben Smith and Jeffrey Resner observe that "the temperate legal language doesn't display the rhetorical heights that run through his memoir, published a few years later."

Once elected president of the Harvard Law Review --more of a popularity than a literary contest -- Obama contributed not one signed word to the HLR or any other law journal. As Matthew Franck has pointed out in National Review Online, "A search of the HeinOnline database of law journals turns up exactly nothing credited to Obama in any law review anywhere at any time."

A 1990 New York Times profile on Obama's election as Harvard's first black president caught the eye of agent Jane Dystel. She persuaded Poseidon, a small imprint of Simon & Schuster, to authorize a roughly $125,000 advance for Obama's proposed memoir.

With advance in hand, Obama repaired to Chicago where he dithered. At one point, in order to finish without interruption, he and wife Michelle decamped to Bali. Obama was supposed to have finished the book within a year. Bali or not, advance or no, he could not. He was surely in way over his head.

According to a surprisingly harsh 2006 article by liberal publisher Peter Osnos, which detailed the "ruthlessness" of Obama's literary ascent, Simon & Schuster canceled the contract. Dystel did not give up. She solicited Times Book, the division of Random House at which Osnos was publisher. He met with Obama, took his word that he could finish the book, and authorized a new advance of $40,000.

Then suddenly, somehow, the muse descended on Obama and transformed him from a struggling, unschooled amateur, with no paper trail beyond an unremarkable legal note and a poem about fig-stomping apes, into a literary superstar.

To be sure, it is not unusual for successful politicians to hire ghostwriters -- John McCain gives due credit to Mark Salter for his memoir, Faith of My Fathers -- but it is highly unusual for unknown young Chicago lawyers to hire ghostwriters.

I have attempted to contact Dystel by phone and email without success. It is highly unlikely she refashioned the book, and Osnos admittedly did not. If my suspicions are correct, the ghost on this book shared many of Obama's sentiments, spoke his language and spent considerable time reworking the text.

I bought Bill Ayers' 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days, for reasons unrelated to this project. As I discovered, he writes surprisingly well and very much like "Obama." In fact, my first thought was that the two may have shared the same ghostwriter. Unlike Dreams, however, where the high style is intermittent, Fugitive Days is infused with the authorial voice in every sentence. What is more, when Ayers speaks, even off the cuff, he uses a cadence and vocabulary consistent with his memoir. One does not hear any of Dreams in Obama's casual speech.

Obama's memoir was published in June 1995. Earlier that year, Ayers helped Obama, then a junior lawyer at a minor law firm, get appointed chairman of the multi-million dollar Chicago Annenberg Challenge grant. In the fall of that same year, 1995, Ayers and his wife, Weatherwoman Bernardine Dohrn, helped blaze Obama's path to political power with a fundraiser in their Chicago home.

In short, Ayers had the means, the motive, the time, the place and the literary ability to jumpstart Obama's career. And, as Ayers had to know, a lovely memoir under Obama's belt made for a much better resume than an unfulfilled contract over his head.

For simplicity sake, I will refer to the author of Dreams as "Obama." Without question, he contributed much of the book's raw material, especially the long-winded accounting of events and conversations, polished just well enough to pass muster. The book's fierce, succinct and tightly coiled social analysis more closely matches the style of Fugitive Days, a much tighter book.

Ayers and Obama have a good deal in common. In the way of background, both grew up in comfortable white households and have struggled to find an identity as righteous black men ever since. Just as Obama resisted "the pure and heady breeze of privilege" to which he was exposed as a child, Ayers too resisted "white skin privilege" or at least tried to.

"I also thought I was black," says Ayers only half-jokingly. As proof of his righteousness, Ayers named his first son "Malik" after the newly Islamic Malcolm X and the second son "Zayd" after Zayd Shakur, a Black Panther killed in a shootout that claimed the life of a New Jersey State Trooper.

Tellingly, Ayers, like Obama, began his career as a self-described "community organizer," Ayers in inner-city Cleveland, Obama in inner-city Chicago. In short, Ayers was fully capable of crawling inside Obama's head and relating in superior prose what the Dreams' author calls a "rage at the white world [that] needed no object."

Indeed, in Dreams, it is on the subject of black rage that Obama writes most eloquently. Phrases like "full of inarticulate resentments," "unruly maleness," "unadorned insistence on respect" and "withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage" lace the book.

In Fugitive Days, "rage" rules and in high style as well. Ayers tells of how his "rage got started" and how it evolved into an "uncontrollable rage -- fierce frenzy of fire and lava." Indeed, the Weathermen's inaugural act of mass violence was the "Days of Rage" in 1969 Chicago.

As in Chicago, that rage led Ayers to a sentiment with which Obama was altogether familiar, "audacity!" Ayers writes, "I felt the warrior rising up inside of me -- audacity and courage, righteousness, of course, and more audacity." This is one of several references.

The combination of audacity and rage has produced two memoirs that follow oddly similar rules. Ayers describes his as "a memory book," one that deliberately blurs facts and changes identities and makes no claims at history. Obama says much the same. In Dreams, some characters are composites. Some appear out of precise chronology. Names have been changed.

As a control, allow me to introduce my own book, Sucker Punch, which is no small part a memoir about race, specifically in my relationship, at great remove, with Muhammad Ali and the world of boxing. In the book, I describe my own unreconstructed coming of age in racially charged Newark, New Jersey as it happened. I change no names, create no composite characters, alter no chronologies. Most memoirs observe the same conventions. Dreams and Fugitive Days, however, are both suffused with repeated reference to lies, lying and what Ayers calls, in his pitch perfect post-modern patois, "our constructed reality."

"But another part of me knew that what I was telling them was a lie," writes Obama, "something I'd constructed from the scraps of information I'd picked up from my mother."

"That whole first year seemed like one long lie," Obama writes of his first year in college in Los Angeles, one of at least a dozen references to lies and lying in "Dreams," a figure nearly matched in "Fugitive Days."

The reader knows that Ayers -- with some justification -- has much to hide. He senses that Obama does too, but he is never quite sure why. This presumed poetic license leads to the frequent manipulation of dates to make a political point.

"I saw a dead body once, as I said, when I was ten, during the Korean War," writes Ayers. This correlation is important enough that Ayers mentions it twice. The only problem is that Ayers was eight when the Korean War ended.

Obama tells us that when he was ten, he and his family visited the mainland. On the trip, back in their motel room, they watched the Watergate Hearings on TV. The problem, of course, is that those hearing started just before Obama turned twelve.

One could forgive a single missed date, but inconsistent dates and numbers appear frequently in both books and often reinforce some moment of lost innocence. In the same spirit, both books abound in detail too closely remembered and conversations too well recorded. These moments in both books occasionally lead to an awareness of the nation's seemingly ineradicable racism.

In 1970, for instance, the 9-year-old Obama alleges to be visiting the American embassy Indonesia. While waiting, he chances upon "a collection of Life magazines neatly displayed in clear plastic binders."

In one magazine, he reads a story about a black man with an "uneven, ghostly hue," who has been rendered grotesque by a chemical treatment. "There were thousands of people like him," Obama learned, "black men and women back in America who'd undergone the same treatment in response to advertisements that promised happiness as a white person."

Obama's attention to detail is a ruse. Life never ran such an article. When challenged, Obama claimed it was Ebony. Ebony ran no such article either. Besides, black was beautiful in 1970.

In a similar vein, Ayers tells of hitching a ride in Missouri with "Bud," the driver of a "brand-new Peterbilt truck." The man proceeds to regale Ayers with a string of dirty jokes -- at least two of them retold word for word -- before reaching under his seat and pulling out a large pistol, his "N****r neutralizer."

"White people can never quite remember the scope and scale of the slavocracy," Ayers reminds the reader again and again, writing as though he were not a member of this benighted race.

These parallels intrigue perhaps, but they prove little. To add a little science to the analysis, I identified two similar "nature" passages in Obama's and Ayers' respective memoirs, the first from Fugitive Days:

"I picture the street coming alive, awakening from the fury of winter, stirred from the chilly spring night by cold glimmers of sunlight angling through the city."

The second from Dreams:

"Night now fell in midafternoon, especially when the snowstorms rolled in, boundless prairie storms that set the sky close to the ground, the city lights reflected against the clouds."

These two sentences are alike in more than their poetic sense, their length and their gracefully layered structure. They tabulate nearly identically on the Flesch Reading Ease Score (FRES), something of a standard in the field.

The "Fugitive Days" excerpt scores a 54 on reading ease and a 12th grade reading level. The "Dreams'" excerpt scores a 54.8 on reading ease and a 12th grade reading level. Scores can range from 0 to 121, so hitting a nearly exact score matters.

A more reliable data-driven way to prove authorship goes under the rubric "cusum analysis" or QSUM. This analysis begins with the measurement of sentence length, a significant and telling variable. To compare the two books, I selected thirty-sentence sequences from Dreams and Fugitive Days, each of which relates the author's entry into the world of "community organizing."

"Fugitive Days" averaged 23.13 words a sentence. "Dreams" averaged 23.36 words a sentence. By contrast, the memoir section of "Sucker Punch" averaged 15 words a sentence.


Interestingly, the 30-sentence sequence that I pulled from Obama's conventional political tract, Audacity of Hope, averages more than 29 words a sentence and clocks in with a 9th grade reading level, three levels below the earlier cited passages from "Dreams" and "Fugitive Days." The differential in the Audacity numbers should not surprise. By the time it was published in 2006, Obama was a public figure of some wealth, one who could afford editors and ghost writers.

The publisher of Dreams, the openly liberal Peter Osnos, tells how this came to be. According to Osnos, Dreams took off during Obama's much-publicized race for the U.S. Senate in 2004, nearly ten years after its modest release. After winning the election, Obama dumped his devoted long time agent, Jane Dystel, and signed a seven-figure deal with Crown, using only a by-the-hour attorney.

Obama pulled off the deal before being sworn in as Senator, this way to avoid the disclosure and reporting requirements applicable to members of Congress. To his credit, Osnos publicly scolds Obama for his "ruthlessness" and "his questionable judgment about using public service as a personal payday."

Unfortunately, the technology is not currently available to do a fully reliable authorship analysis. As expert in the field Patrick Juola of Duquesne University observed, “The accuracy simply isn't there.” He cautioned that for high stakes issues like this one, “The repercussions of a technical error could be a disaster (in either direction).”

That much said, preliminary QSUM analysis supports an Ayers-Obama link. Systems designer Ed Gold--with twenty years of high-level experience in image and signal processing, pattern recognition, and classifier design and implementation--volunteered to run a QSUM scan on multiple excerpts from both memoirs. “I have completed the analysis,” he wrote me, “and I think you will be pleased with the findings.” In assessing the signature of sample passages from Dreams, he found “a very strong match to all of the Ayers samples that I processed.”

Like Juola, Gold recognized the limitations of the process and of his own resources. He has volunteered to make the raw data available to more established authorship authentication experts, and I will be happy to pass that data along. Gold saw the complementary value, however, in text analysis, as did Juola, who encouraged me “to do what you're already doing . . . good old-fashioned literary detective work.”

Given that advice, I dug deeper into both memoirs and established one metaphoric thread that ties the two books together in a way I believe is just shy of conclusive, a thread that leads back to Bill Ayers's stint, after dropping out of college, as a merchant seaman.

"I'd thought that when I signed on that I might write an American novel about a young man at sea," says Ayers in his memoir, Fugitive Days, "but I didn't have it in me."

The experience had a powerful impact on Ayers. Years later, he would recall a nightmare he had while crossing the Atlantic, "a vision of falling overboard in the middle of the ocean and swimming as fast as I could as the ship steamed off and disappeared over the horizon."

Although Ayers has tried to put his anxious 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.

"Memory sails out upon a murky sea," Ayers writes at one point. Indeed, both he and Obama are obsessed with memory and its instability. The latter writes of its breaks, its blurs, its edges, its lapses. Obama also has a fondness for the word "murky" and its aquatic usages.

"The unlucky ones drift into the murky tide of hustles and odd jobs," he writes, one of four times "murky" appears in Dreams. Ayers and Obama also speak often of waves and wind, Obama at least a dozen times on wind alone. "The wind wipes away my drowsiness, and I feel suddenly exposed," he writes in a typical passage. Both also make conspicuous use of the word "flutter."

Not surprisingly, Ayers uses "ship" as a metaphor with some frequency. Early in the book he tells us that his mother is "the captain of her own ship," not a substantial one either but "a ragged thing with fatal leaks" launched into a "sea of carelessness."

Obama too finds himself "feeling like the first mate on a sinking ship." He also makes a metaphorical reference to "a tranquil sea." More intriguing is Obama's use of the word "ragged" as an adjective as in the highly poetic "ragged air" or "ragged laughter."

Both books use "storms" and "horizons" both as metaphor and as reality. Ayers writes poetically of an "unbounded horizon," and Obama writes of "boundless prairie storms" and poetic horizons-"violet horizon," "eastern horizon," "western horizon."

Ayers often speaks of "currents" and "pockets of calm" as does Obama, who uses both as nouns as in "a menacing calm" or "against the current" or "into the current." The metaphorical use of the word "tangled" might also derive from one's nautical adventures. Ayers writes of his "tangled love affairs" and Obama of his "tangled arguments."

In Dreams, we read of the "whole panorama of life out there" and in Fugitive Days, "the whole weird panorama." Ayers writes of still another panorama, this one "an immense panorama of waste and cruelty." Obama employs the word "cruel" and its derivatives no fewer than fourteen times in Dreams.

On at least twelve occasions, Obama speaks of "despair," as in the "ocean of despair." Ayers speaks of a "deepening despair," a constant theme for him as well. Obama's "knotted, howling assertion of self" sounds like something from the pages of Jack London's "The Sea Wolf."

In Obama's defense, he did grow up in Hawaii. Still, the short Hawaii stretch of his memoir is largely silent on the island's natural appeal. Sucker Punch again offers a useful control. It makes no reference at all, metaphorical or otherwise, to ships, seas, oceans, calms, storms, wind, waves, horizons, panoramas, or to things howling, fluttering, knotted, ragged, tangled, or murky. None. And yet I have spent a good chunk of every summer of my life at the ocean.

If there is any one paragraph in Dreams that has convinced me of Ayers' involvement it is this one, in which Obama describes the Black Nationalist message:

"A steady attack on the white race... served as the ballast that could prevent the ideas of personal and communal responsibility from tipping into an ocean of despair."

As a writer, especially in the pre-Google era of Dreams, I would never have used a metaphor as specific as "ballast" unless I knew exactly what I was talking about. Seaman Ayers most surely did.

One more item of interest. In his 1997 book, A Kind and Just Parent, Bill Ayers walks the reader through his Hyde Park neighborhood and identifies the notable residents therein. Among them are Muhammad Ali, “Minister” Louis Farrakhan (of whom he writes fondly), “former mayor” Eugene Sawyer, “poets” Gwendolyn Brooks and Elizabeth Alexander, and “writer” Barack Obama.

In 1997, Obama was an obscure state senator, a lawyer, and a law school instructor with one book under his belt that had debuted two years earlier to little acclaim and lesser sales. In terms of identity, he had more in common with mayor Sawyer than poet Brooks. The “writer” identification seems forced and purposefully so, a signal perhaps to those in the know of a persona in the making that Ayers had himself helped forge.

None of this, of course, proves Ayers' authorship conclusively, but the evidence makes him a much more likely candidate than Obama to have written the best parts of Dreams.

The Obama camp could put all such speculation to rest by producing some intermediary sign of impending greatness -- a school paper, an article, a notebook, his Columbia thesis, his LSAT scores -- but Obama guards these more zealously than Saddam did his nuclear secrets. And I suspect, at the end of the day, we will pay an equally high price for Obama's concealment as Saddam's.

Jack Cashill is the author, among other books, of Hoodwinked: How Intellectual Hucksters Hijacked American Culture. He has a Ph.D. in American studies from Purdue University.

No Regrets

http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/August-2001/No-Regrets/

No Regrets
Marcia Froelke Coburn
August 2001

At 55, Bill Ayers, the notorious sixties radical, still carries a whiff of that rock 'n' roll decade: the oversize wire-rim glasses that, in a certain light, reveal themselves as bifocals; a backpack over his shoulder—not some streamlined, chic job, but a funky backpack-of-the-people, complete with a photo button of abolitionist John Brown pinned to one strap.

Yet he is also a man of the moment. For example: There is his cell phone, laid casually on the tabletop of this neighborhood Taylor Street coffee shop, and his passion for double skim lattes. In conversation, he has an immediate, engaging presence; he may not have known you long but, his manner suggests, he's already fascinated. Then there is his quick laugh and his tendency to punctuate his comments by a tap on your arm.

Overall, it is not easy to imagine him as part of the Weatherman, a group that during the late sixties and early seventies openly called for revolution in America, led a violent rampaging protest in Chicago, and took credit for numerous bombings around the United States.

One of the Weatherman leaders was Bernardine Dohrn, a smart, magnetic figure who, in part because of her penchant for miniskirts and knee-high boots, was dubbed "La Pasionaria of the Lunatic Left" by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. After a bomb exploded accidentally and killed three of their colleagues, Ayers and Dohrn "hooked up," in the parlance of the day, and, since 1982, they have been married. This—violence, death, and white-hot rhetoric—is his past and Ayers insists he has no regrets. "I acted appropriately in the context of those times," he says. But it's hard to reconcile this quick-witted man with that revolutionary. Today Bill Ayers seems too happy to have ever been so angry.

Ayers, now a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, claims to abhor nostalgia ("Nothing is more boring than some old person going on and on about the way things used to be"). But he has been thinking lately about the past—both his and the country's—and soon he will likely be engaged in what he calls "a dialogue" about the sixties, the antiwar movement, and the radical life he led. The spur for this dialogue will be the publication of Fugitive Days (Beacon Press, $24), a memoir Ayers has written about the trajectory of his life, from a pampered son of the Chicago suburbs to a young pacifist to a founder of one of the most radical political organizations in U.S. history.

In the pantheon of radicals of the sixties and seventies, Ayers's place is unique. "He was not as notorious as Bernardine Dohrn," says Don Rose, a political consultant who has written about those times. "But what made Ayers of particular interest then was that he was the son of a captain of industry. Now he's interesting because, of all the farther-out radicals, he has achieved the most scholarly reputation."

Writing the book has been "a daunting task," Ayers says, "because I want to be true to those times. I don't feel nostalgic for the sixties, but there is no doubt in my mind that the events I write about were shaping events, and they provided for me a way of seeing the world that seemed so alive and so resonant that I can't escape it, no matter what I do."

Certainly there are moments when Ayers has the sound of the sixties down pat, like when he tells me, "Imperialism or globalization—I don't have to care what it's called to hate it." And then there are moments when he sounds light-years away from his radical sensibilities, more like an old grump lamenting today's uninformed youth: He tells me a story about going into Starbucks and having the young woman behind the counter mistake his photo pin of John Brown for Walt Whitman. "And when I told her, no, it's John Brown, she said, 'Who is John Brown?'"

But I am struck by another part of that story. What are you doing in a Starbucks? I ask the man who professes to hate globalization.

"Oh," he says. "I have an addiction to caffeine."

There you have the complexity of Ayers: a man who once tried to overthrow his country's government and now works for a state university; an opponent of the bourgeoisie who has been married for 20 years; a left-wing radical who loves a good cup of imperialist coffee. Maybe he's always known how to choose his battles. Once one of his sons wanted to hear about how Ayers had been a draft card burner. "Tell me again how you burned your credit card, Pop," his son confusedly asked.

"I'm not that radical," Ayers retorted.

* * *

He grew up in Glen Ellyn, where the grass was literally always greener. His father, Thomas Ayers, was a long-time executive of Commonwealth Edison and served as chairman from 1973 to 1980. "Nice was crucially important," Bill Ayers writes of his childhood, and it's clear in his memoir that what Ayers has long been running from is not so much the law of the 1960s and 1970s but the upper-middle-class sensibility in which he was raised. He attended Lake Forest Academy, where he was the sole member of the Young Socialists of America; he hated every minute of school there. He liked what he found at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor: freewheeling thought, radicalism, and a passionate desire to stop the war in Vietnam, at almost any cost. Soon he dropped out, joined the Students for a Democratic Society, and became a full-time activist; arrests in demonstrations quickly followed, much to his family's dismay.

One of the more amusing passages in Fugitive Days comes when Ayers recounts a generations-in-conflict conversation when his father counseled caution:

"Don't close too many doors to the future," he said. "Don't take too many steps down a one-way street."

"What are you doing to end the war?" I challenged.

"Edison isn't political," he said. "That's not our business. . . . I'd be doubtful about a group calling itself Students for a Democratic Society—this is, after all, a democratic society."

"Well, I'm doubtful about a group calling itself Commonwealth Edison," I said. "There's nothing common about wealth."

He walked out of jail and into his first teaching job, at a daycare center in Ann Arbor. Soon he was the 21-year-old director of the place. It was there he met Diana Oughton, a beautiful and accomplished young woman. They fell in love and attended SDS conventions together. As the war dragged on and U.S. politics became more polarized, some of the war resisters—including Ayers, Oughton, and Dohrn—turned more militant. They started a group called the Weatherman, a name inspired by the Bob Dylan song lyric "You don't need a weatherman / To know which way the wind blows."

In 1969, they decided to "bring the war home" by staging a protest in Chicago during the trial of the "Chicago Eight" radicals accused of conspiring to cross state lines to incite a riot during the 1968 Democratic National Convention here. (Their conviction was later overturned.) "The Days of Rage," as the 1969 protest was called, brought several hundred members of the Weatherman—many of them attired for battle with helmets and weapons—to Lincoln Park. The tear-gassed marches, window smashing, and clashes with police lasted four days, during which 290 militants were arrested and 63 people were injured. Damage to windows, cars, and other property soared to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Around this time, Ayers summed up the Weatherman philosophy as "Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents—that's where it's really at."

"The rhetoric was excessive because the times were excessive," says Ayers. "The war had escalated, so naturally the language escalated. No one thought I meant that literally."

Between 1970 and 1974, the Weatherman took credit for 12 bombings, including one of the United States Capitol and another involving several police cars. The group always emphasized that their targets were property, not people. And, in fact, no one was injured—except, of course, some of the Weatherman's own.

In 1970, a bomb that was apparently being built in a Greenwich Village townhouse, occupied by at least five members of the Weatherman, accidentally exploded—killing three of the group, including Ayers's beloved Diana Oughton. In Fugitive Days, Ayers tries to imagine what happened. Maybe Diana tried to stop the others from their path? Maybe they all drank too much coffee and smoked too many cigarettes?

Maybe Diana saw that this bomb, packed with nails and screws, would have exacted a heavy human toll if it had ever reached its destination—a New Jersey military base. Could she have, in a gesture of sacrifice, crossed the wires herself? "I'll never know what happened," he says. "That's the price I have to pay."

The deaths—and two federal indictments—sent Ayers and his remaining comrades underground. The fugitives eluded the FBI for ten years through a series of constantly changing identities and locations. In one of the most haunting scenes in Fugitive Days, Ayers wanders through remote Midwestern cemeteries, looking for the gravestones of babies who, like them, had been born between 1940 and 1950 but had died shortly thereafter. It was from those headstones that the fugitives would build their new identities. Overall, Ayers figures, he had at least 12 separate aliases while living in 15 different states. The one he used most often was "Joe." Bernardine's favorite was "Rose," and to honor her, Ayers got the rose tattoo he now sports on his forearm.

In 1980, Ayers and Dohrn turned themselves in. (The first words Ayers's father said to him were, "You need a haircut.") By then they had had two children together, and the bombing conspiracy charge against the couple had been dismissed due to government misconduct.

Dohrn plea-bargained to charges of inciting to mob action and resisting police officers. She was sentenced to three years' probation and a $1,500 fine. Ayers was not charged. Even then he showed a way with words: "Guilty as hell, free as a bird—America is a great country," he said.

The next year, a Weatherman killed a Brink's guard and two state troopers in a bungled armored truck robbery. Kathy Boudin, the daughter of an esteemed New York civil rights lawyer, was sentenced to 20 years to life for her role in the crime; Ayers and Dohrn adopted her infant son. Today Ayers says it was partly because of "[the boy's] questions of who he is and what the background of his mother's life was that [Ayers] started to write this memoir."

* * *

Now, Ayers is a respected name in the field of education; his books, including To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher and A Good Preschool Teacher, are hailed by some as groundbreaking and thoughtful approaches to learning. Certainly they are reactions against the popular theories of the 1950s, which held that students were empty vessels to be filled with knowledge.

"Essentially, you must see the student before you as a locus of energy," he says. "He already has a heart, a soul, a mind, interests, and dreams. You need to help him shape those interests, pursue those dreams." Ayers is distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where two years ago the university named him Senior University Scholar, an award given to outstanding faculty members. He also directs the Center for Youth and Society, an organization that brings an interdisciplinary approach to working with youth—from art education to after-school programs. One of the center's recent efforts was a symposium inspired by the book Racism Explained to My Daughter, by Tahar Ben Jelloun. "We brought together people to discuss how to address racism with kids," says Therese Quinn, associate director of the center. What strikes Quinn about Ayers is "his enthusiasm and optimism," she says. "He is just overwhelmingly generous and supportive."

"Teaching has always been, for me, linked to issues of social justice," he says. "I've never considered it a neutral or passive profession."

In Fugitive Days, Ayers has a personable style that pulls the reader in from the book's start—when he describes the moment he heard about the 1970 Greenwich Village explosion. It is the moment, of course, when his own life figuratively blew apart. "In the beginning, Bill wanted to write about the Vietnam War and why he thought it was wrong," says Helene Atwan, director of Beacon Press, who edited Ayers's book. "But I told him that most Americans now believed that that war was wrong and certainly the people reading a book of memoirs would feel that. I wanted him to concentrate on his personal story."

Except for a few minor polemics along the way, Ayers does—and then some. "He very effectively captures the spirit of the times," says Bernardine Dohrn, who is now a clinical associate professor at Northwestern University School of Law. "He conjures it up and reflects on it."

Like her husband, Dohrn claims she feels no need to escape the legacy of the 1960s and 1970s. "I feel it's always with me. It's taken a long time to achieve a precarious balance about it, where it's not all defining and a cartoon. But this isn't just my problem; it's a generation's problem."

For two radicals once living underground, Ayers and Dohrn have raised three accomplished children: Zayd (named for a fallen Black Liberation soldier and colleague), 24, graduated from Brown University and has an M.F.A. degree in writing from Boston University, where he now teaches; Malik (for Malcolm X), 21, is attending the University of California at San Diego; and Chesa, 20, their adopted son, just finished his sophomore year at Yale University.

Recently, Ayers himself has returned to school as a student for the first time since he earned his Ph.D. in education at Columbia University—thanks to the monetary award he received from UIC as senior university scholar. He periodically commutes to Bennington College for the school's low-residency M.F.A. program in writing, in which he is concentrating on nonfiction. So far, he has studied with essayist Philip Lopate and novelist/memoirist Susan Cheever. "It's exciting and scary and all those good things," he says. "They have been wonderful in helping me find my own voice."

That is not something you would have thought Ayers needed help with. It is a different time, though, and he is a different man. But not completely changed. Talk to him for any length of time and some rhetoric of the past slips into the conversation. "I think there will be another mass political movement," he predicts, "because I believe that the kind of injustice that is built into our world will not go quietly into the night."

But the time-warp moment is over as quickly as it begins. Ayers—totally back in the present moment—pauses to sip his double skim latte, then greets a graduate student who awaits his attention. "These aren't mountain times, these are valley times," he says, acknowledging a change in the culture, the political climate, and maybe even in himself. "But you can still work the vineyard where you are."

Photograph: Jeff Sciortino

Strangely Timed Obama Response Ad

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalradar/2008/08/strangely-timed.html

Strangely Timed Obama Response Ad on William Ayers
August 25, 2008

ABC News' Tahman Bradley Reports: As Michelle Obama prepares for a primetime speech that will talk about her and Barack Obama's American values, the Obama campaign is using a new television ad to take on the issue of Obama's association with a 1970s radical who bombed the Capitol and Pentagon.

The release of the ad, first reported on Time.com's "The Page", could have the unintended consequence of reminding voters that Obama has in the past been friendly with William Ayers, a Chicago law professor who to this day remains unrepentant about his work with the violent Weather Underground group in the 1960s and 70s.

Obama has denounced Ayers' actions with the radical group, but has also referred to Ayers as "mainstream" and "respectable," a point that conservatives continue to pound the soon-to-be Democratic nominee about.

A 501(c) 4 group, acting independent of Republican John McCain's presidential campaign, last week, hammered Obama for his relationship with Ayers with a provocative television spot in Ohio and Michigan.

"Why would Barack Obama be friends with someone who bombed the Capitol and is proud of it? Do you know enough to elect Barack Obama," the spot by American Issues Project says.

Some news organization, including Fox News Channel, refused to air the ad which uses images of 9/11. The Obama campaign says it has been reaching out to advertisers and sponsors to put pressure on stations to reject the ad, which it calls "despicable" and "false."

Rather than firing back at the outside group, the Obama campaign uses its new TV ad to accuse Sen. McCain of raising the Ayers issue in the presidential campaign.

"With all our problems, why is John McCain talking about the sixties, trying to link Barack Obama to radical Bill Ayers?," an announcer says.

The spot is incorrect in insinuating that John McCain himself has brought up Ayers -- it is in fact McCain's campaign that has sought to use the Ayers association against Obama, and McCain spokesman Brian Rogers did so again upon learning about the ad.

"The fact that Barack Obama chose to launch his political career at the home of an unrepentant terrorist raises more questions about Senator Obama's judgment than any TV ad ever could," Rogers said in a statement.

To the Obama campaign's point, a former McCain aide, Ed Failor Jr. is a key backer of American Issues Project, although he no longer has official ties with the campaign.

The group's sole $2.87 million funder, Texas billionaire Harold Simmons, has bundled between $50,000 and $100,000 for McCain. Simmons, along with another organizer for American Issues Project, Christian Pinkston, were both involved with the 2004 Swift Boats Veterans for Truth group that assailed Sen. John Kerry's war record.

The Obama campaign's attorney Bob Bauer sent a letter to the Justice Department arguing that American Issues Project is engaging is evading federal election law.

501(c) 4 groups are prohibited by law from coordinating with political campaigns to attack a candidate. The McCain campaign denies it has coordinated with the group.

Even with American Issues Project's possible ties to McCain, one key issue still remain. Why would the Obama campaign even want to bring up Ayers as the Democratic National Convention gets underway tonight in Denver?

Swift-Boat Group Sinks Nearly $3 Million Into Ad

http://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/08/group_plunks_down_nearly_3_mil.php

Swift-Boat Group Sinks Nearly $3 Million Into Ad Tying Obama To Ayers
By Greg Sargent - August 25, 2008

The other day, the independent Swift-Boating outfit American Issues Project vowed to plunk down a cool $2.8 million on a slimy and vicious ad tying Obama to former Weatherman Bill Ayers.

Such vows often can be mere bluster designed to get free media and gin up contributions. Not this time, however.

The FEC report from the group is in, and it confirms that the group did in fact plunk down the nearly $3 million to air the ad.

That's a sizable buy. Meanwhile, Evan Tracey, who tracks national ad campaigns for the Campaign Media Analysis Group, confirms to me that the spot is running in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.

This ad, in short, matters. The Obama campaign apparently realizes this too: They have a response ad up in Ohio that hasn't been released yet.

In other words, the spot tying Obama to Ayers is the real deal -- the first wave of the Swift-Boating that has yet to materialize in earnest.

Ayers & Obama

Whatever one thinks about Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground, this is an ad that is gonna stick. And this is just the beginning of the Ayers-Obama attacks, as here's a picture that soon will be all over the news channels:

The photo is from the August 2001 issue of Chicago Magazine. The caption below the picture reads:

"Bill Ayers, August 2001, former Weatherman, stomps on U.S. flag."

In case you forgot, something happened the following month...

The title of the article featuring these photos, incidentally?

"No Regrets"

No more cute photos of Obama with Paris & Britney. Preseason is officially over...