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PrintApril 8, 2011
Time for the Conservative Media to Step Up
On his radio program yesterday, Sean Hannity interviewed that irrepressible rogue elephant, Donald Trump. At about the 10:30 mark of this interview, Hannity made the salient point that "journalism in America died in 2008." He then proceeded to cite his own efforts to revive it during that campaign season with his investigations into Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers.
At the mention of Ayers, at the 11:04 mark, Trump volunteered, "Bill Ayers, in my opinion, wrote the first book, which was a genius book, and the second one was average." The first book was Barack Obama's 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father. The second was Obama's 2006 follow-up, Audacity of Hope.
Although Trump overstated the quality of Dreams, he correctly assessed that the two books had different authors: "One was Ernest Hemingway, the other was the guy from my high school." Trump also correctly noted that Dreams paved the way to Obama's 2004 convention speech and to the presidency itself.
When Hannity asked Trump, "What makes you think that Ayers wrote the book," Trump went on to cite Ayers's claim to authorship and his own ability as author to discern the difference between the writing quality of each book. Of course, I would have preferred if Trump had cited my own book, Deconstructing Obama, but I understand why he did not. It would take too long to establish who I am and why I should be believed. I appreciate his raising the topic at all.
American Thinker publisher Thomas Lifson has accurately called Obama's claimed authorship of Dreams, "the most politically significant literary fraud in history." This is not the first time Hannity has played a role in exposing it.
In September 2009, celebrity biographer, Christopher Andersen, an establishment journalist with credentials of the first order, appeared on The Hannity Show to promote his latest book, Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage.
If Andersen did not fire his publicist after the show, he should have. The natural audience for his book skews female and left. USA Today had accurately described it as "a glowing 'Portrait' of the Obamas' rock-solid marriage," and yet here was Hannity pounding on one of the book's few unfriendly revelations, namely that Ayers helped write Dreams.
On air, Hannity quoted Andersen's claim that "literary devices and themes [in Dreams] bear a jarring similarity to Ayers' own writings." Asked Hannity, "Bill Ayers helped him with his book?" Andersen answered in the affirmative and then anxiously changed topic. Hannity, sensing perhaps he had gotten all he could, let Andersen move on, but the proverbial cat had crept rather publicly out the bag.
There is just so far Hannity can take this on his own. He does not have a literary editor on staff. The National Review does. So do the Weekly Standard and the Washington Times. For reasons not fully clear to me, they have chosen to turn their back on this whole topic for the last two-plus years.
If, however, these journals continue to ignore the fact that a leading candidate has publicly accused the sitting president of massive literary fraud, they deserve to be taken no more seriously than the Daily Kos.
