PrintMarch 10, 2011
Three Cheers for Jack Cashill
Would you believe me if I told you that while in Milan last weekend, I'd been to La Scala for the world premiere of a new opera by George W. Bush? And would you ever again take me seriously if I published a review of Bush's new opera in which I wrote that "...through this work, so infused with the passion of Carmen, the musicality of La Boheme and the drama of Tosca, our forty-third president takes his place as the most gifted composer in the history of American politics"?
Of course not. No one, not even that former-Bush-White-House-press-secretary blonde who keeps showing up on Fox News, would believe this because it's utterly preposterous. A man who has displayed not the slightest musical talent simply cannot sit down one day and produce an operatic masterpiece.
And as Jack Cashill proves in Deconstructing Obama, it is just as preposterous to believe that President Obama actually wrote his lyrical, extravagantly praised autobiography, Dreams from My Father. On page after page, chapter after chapter, Cashill shows why it simply isn't possible for Obama to have produced such a high-quality autobiography. For instance, Obama wrote nearly nothing before Dreams from My Father, despite being president of the Harvard Law Review, and what little he wrote in the years after Harvard is clunky and sophomoric. And yet Dreams from My Father contains some of the most elegant, evocative sentences ever penned by a politician:
I heard all our voices begin to run together, the sound of three generations tumbling over each other like the currents of a slow-moving stream, my questions like rocks roiling the water, the breaks in memory separating the currents....
Huh? Obama has been our president for more than two years, and hardly a day goes by without him blathering on about some issue. Jokes about his dependence on the teleprompter are a staple of the late-night television comics. The president's inaugural address -- which he surely didn't dash off casually, because he must have understood that this is the speech that one day will be carved into the marble wall of his monument -- contains not one memorable phrase or sentence. So how did he write the kinds of poetic, elegiac passages that make Dreams from My Father a literary near-masterpiece?
As Cashill shows, he didn't. And he demonstrates, with as much precision as you can get short of a DNA sample, that Dreams was actually written by Obama's Hyde Park colleague, friend and neighbor, the terrorist Bill Ayers. (There's even more evidence of Ayers' authorship in Cashill's book than in the articles about this he's written for American Thinker.) Oh, and Cashill reports two specific instances in which Ayers acknowledges his authorship of Dreams. That's interesting, to say the least.
Moving beyond the text of Dreams, Cashill does a masterful job walking readers through the details of Obama's complicated life, and showing why people who question every facet of Obama's bio are right to do so. How did such a mediocre student get into Columbia University, and then Harvard Law? If the "birthers" are nuts -- as Establishment pooh-bahs like George Will profess to believe -- how come the so-called "certificate of live birth" released online by the Obama team in 2008 doesn't list the name of the Honolulu hospital at which the future president is said to have been born. (My birth certificate lists the hospital. Doesn't yours? Have you ever seen a birth certificate that doesn't include the hospital's name?) And when lawyers in Kenya trying to track down anyone who might have a claim on the estate of Barack Obama Sr. contacted Obama's mother for the usual birth-certificate information about her son, how come she couldn't provide it? (By the way, Cashill pulls this troubling, but little-noticed incident, right out of Dreams. Also interesting -- or is "explosive" the better word.)
And it's even more interesting to read Cashill's riveting account of his mostly-futile efforts to get leading members of our country's mainstream media to take notice that something -- sorry, everything -- about Dreams and its purported author is seriously askew. And this is what makes Deconstructing Obama a seriously important book. Obama wouldn't be the first ambitious politician to have used a ghostwriter without giving credit to the wordsmith who made the rising star look good in print. But uniquely in Obama's case, his entire credibility during the 2008 campaign rested on his image as a brilliant man; a man who'd lived the multicultural life we'd been told could finally take our country beyond its racist, militaristic past and safely into the future.
By Deconstructing Obama page by page -- and piece by piece -- Cashill brings the reader to understand that in 2008 "Barak Obama" wasn't a candidate but a carefully created myth. The leftist mainstream media bought that myth, which is why they blew off Cashill and his overwhelming amount of evidence that so much about Obama was fraudulent. That's why Obama's close relationships with Ayers and with the vicious America-hater Jeremiah Wright were ignored by the mainstream media during the campaign, and also that telling comment by Michelle about her husband's candidacy being the first time she'd ever been proud of our country. After all, if any part of the myth turned out to be false, Obama's candidacy would have collapsed. That didn't happen, of course, and it's depressing to realize that when given the choice between a myth and a genuine war hero -- American voters chose the myth.
In the long run, reality always wins. Tomorrow, or next year, or sometime later this century the truth about Barack Obama will trickle out. And when that happens, "Barak Obama" will be exposed as a myth. And Jack Cashill will get the recognition he deserves as the best investigative journalist of our time.
Herbert E. Meyer served during the Reagan Administration as Special Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence and Vice Chairman of the CIA's National Intelligence Council. He is author of two new eBooks, How to Analyze Information and The Cure for Poverty
