New Yorker editor David Remnick's new book smears Jack Cashill, and honest observers are noticing. (Reminick's biography of Barack Obama is discussed today by Jack Cashill).

... aside from snide comments, Remnick does nothing to take on Cashill's actual arguments. Saying he is part of a "lunatic orbit" is not exactly any kind of a real answer. But he does more....  He calls  Cashill's argument racist! First, he calls the claim that Obama had a ghost writer a "libel" that has a particularly "ugly pedigree." It is this:

 ... writers like [Frederick] Douglass had to call on white men to authenticate their texts, the better to disprove the antebellum Jack Cashills and Rush Limbaugh ready to declare fraud.

Remnick continues to argue that Douglass had to assure white readers that he wrote the book, by providing authentication from people such as William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips so that he would have the "seal of white endorsement."  Remnick writes:

Garrison vouched for Douglass' literacy. The title, too, indicates a need to deny a sham. It is called the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself.

A century and a half later, thinking a degree of racial progress had been achieved,  Barack Obama and his publisher had not thought to collect such endorsements. (my emphasis.)

That ends the chapter. Remnick, instead of showing how, why and where the questions raised by Cashill have no merit, simply asserts that like in the times of slavery, white critics today argue that Obama might not have written his book and needed a ghost writer to help him because they too are racist, and believe that Obama or any other articulate, smart and educated African-American cannot write his own book!