Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Experts Claim Ayers Ghostwrote Obama's Autobiography

There had always been rumblings that President John F. Kennedy's Pulitzer-prize winning "Profiles In Courage" had been ghostwritten by Theodore Sorensen. Although the allegations were denied during Kennedy's life time, many years later Sorensen essentially confirmed that he had written much of what was in the book. Now several experts who have analyzed the literary style of Sen. Barack Obama's "Dream From My Father" are claiming that the book was likely written by Obama's domestic terrorist buddy, William Ayers. WorldNetDaily reports:

Independent scientific analysis by a number of leading experts supports the literary detective work of WND columnist Jack Cashill that has led him to conclude unrepentant domestic terrorist William Ayers was the primary author of important sections of Barack Obama's highly acclaimed memoir and editor of the book as a whole.

Obama's 1995 book, "Dreams From My Father," 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, Cashill has unveiled in a dozen columns, summarized here, his compelling evidence that the co-founder of the radical Weather Underground group – dismissed by Obama as "just a guy who lives in my neighborhood" – shaped and refined the book with his exceptional writing skill and radical ideas.

The evidence, Cashill says, "severely tests Obama's claim of a superficial relationship with the self-declared 'communist' Ayers. This appears to be a conscious and consequential deception." Cashill points out 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," he writes. "It is as if a high 90s golfer suddenly showed up with his PGA card -- with no known practice rounds in between."

So how does an expert determine if someone other than the purported author is responsible for the writing? Well, the people who do this kind of analysis are called "stylometric analysts." Cashill claims that four different such experts concluded through the use of a sophisticated computer program that Ayers had a hand in writing Obama's autobiography. The story explains:

Cashill's expert team includes 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.

Cashill cautions that the data-driven computer analysis is not foolproof, but all of the four independent tests that have been completed point to the same conclusion, that Ayers was heavily involved in the writing of "Dreams."

One analyst, who used his own proprietary software, wrote to Cashill that there is a "strong likelihood" that the author of "Fugitive Days," Ayers' own memoir, ghost-wrote "Dreams From My Father" using recordings of dialog.

The analyst said it's also possible Ayers served as a "book doctor," drastically rewriting work Obama already had done.

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