The following is a brief excerpt from Fugitive Days by William Ayers.
“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 following is a similar poetic excerpt from Dreams From My Father by Sen Barack Obama.
“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.”
The similarities in image and language is striking. Interestingly enough, when comparing the speech patterns of the two individuals -- a very telling indication of literary style -- both excerpts sound like William Ayers, while neither excerpt sounds in any way like the vocal patterns of Sen Barack Obama.
This is something that might not be noted by the casual reader, or speech watcher. But the way that people write is almost always identifiable to the way that they speak.
Readers of my own ramblings have pointed out that I often write in long, clause heavy sentences, with much punctuation and disconnected thoughts. Interestingly enough, when engaged in discussion, I speak in exactly the same manner. Barack Obama never speaks in the same manner as his first memoir -- which is suspect in itself.
A bit of review is in order. Almost none of Barack Obama's early writings are available for discussion. He either never scribed a paper throughout his collegiate career, or those papers have systematically been removed from public view. Cashill has unearthed a handful of early writings, including a couple of pieces of "very bad poetry" (in Obama's own words.)
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 . . .
Available at Cashill.com and again at The American Thinker, Cashill examines the writings of the two in both literary and scientific terms. Cashill cannot "guarantee" without question that Ayers was the ghostwriter for Obama, but the evidence would certainly hold up in most American courts of law.
In 1990, Jane Dystel, a New York agent, convinced Poseidon Press to hand a young Barry Obama a check for $125,000 for his memoir. As the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, she believed there was a market for his thoughts. Unfortunately, Barry encountered writer's block, and the the owners of Poseidon Press, Simon & Schuster gave on on him, canceling the contract. Dystel then was able to arrange for a subsidiary of Random House to advance Obama $40,000 on the promise that he would finish the memoir. Suddenly the muse struck, and within a short time, the memoir was finished. More than finished, it was immediately acclaimed as literary genius.
Where did this sudden, hitherto unknown genius come from? By way of circumstantial evidence Cashill writes:
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.
As to the scientific evidence unearthed by Cashill, he presents the Flesch Reading Ease Score (FRES). Take the two excerpts at the beginning of this piece, one from Fugitive and the other from Dreams. the Fugitive excerpt has a FRES of 54 and is written at a 12th grade level. The Dream excerpt has a FRES score of 54.8 and is also written at a 12th grade level. A FRES score can range from 0 to 121, so the similarity between the two is striking.
By comparison, the second memoir penned by Sen Obama in Audacity of Hope was written at a 9th grade level. Either his second memoir was penned by a different author, or he had by that time, learned to talk down to his audience.
Of particular interest is the Cumulative Sum Technique (Qsum) which has been used to prove authorship in courts of law. Qsum is still considered inconclusive however.
Using Qsum, the first analysis is of sentence length. Fugitive averages 23.13 words per sentence, while Dreams averages 23.36. By contrast, Audacity, penned later, clocks in at 29 words per sentence.
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.”
Cashill's research discovered additional indicators of a Ayers authorship of Obama's first memoir. Both use nearly identical imagery and style, and strikingly similar anger and disassociation with the truth. Both refer to lies and liars, while taking poetic license with the truth in telling their own stories.
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.
This is one more important connection between Ayers and Obama, a link that provides evidence that "he's a guy that lives in my neighborhood" is a falsehood. You need to read the links provided, and spread this word so that the MSM will take up the questions asked, and hopefully, ask for answers.
...Well done!