Right wing efforts to tar the image of Bill Ayers and to damage Barack Obama by association continue and have taken a futile leap of imagination.
Now Jack Cashill writes on the "American Thinker" website that Barack Obama had help writing his 1995 book "Dreams from my father : a story of race and inheritance." But Cashill uses only circumstantial evidence to further the right wing smear campaign that defames Ayers to cast Barack Obama in a negative light.
Educated readers will see through the thin logic that Jack Cashill uses in his "American Thinker" attack on Barack Obama.
Evidence continues to mount that Barack Obama had substantial help from Bill Ayers in the creation of his 1995 book, Dreams From My Father, a book that Time Magazine has called "the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician."
But the evidence that Cashill cites is flimsy and based on weak assertions.
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.
Cashill goes on the claim that because Obama's writing in 1990 was " without a hint of style, sophistication, or promise" it is not possible that he wrote Dreams From my Father. But writers evolve and do not always put the same effort into writing targeted for different venues.
Cashill goes on to claim because the only signed piece Obama wrote for the Law Review (Barack Obama was the President of the Harvard Law Review) was "a fairly standard example of the genre" Obama could not have written Dreams.
This assertion fails without merit because it neglects to acknowledge that law writing has its own format, just as journalism or science writing does. This format is different from a narrative one would write in a personal account like Dreams.
As the article wears on, it is clear that it reveals more about Cashill than about either Ayers or Obama. He ends by claiming that Ayers is using Obama to achieve things to which Ayers could not aspire because of his background. He forgets that people who want to work for the greater good, like Obama, sometimes do it for just that reason.
Because it is for the greater good.