Some Days You Just Feel Vindicated
When I arrived home late last night after attending the George Zimmerman trial in Sanford, Florida, I watched the Miami Heat beat the San Antonio Spurs -- great game! -- just as I predicted they would, but it was not until I checked my email inbox that I really began to feel vindicated.
First, I was alerted to a series of articles about a new documentary simply titled TWA Flight 800 -- that has the very real potential to reopen the investigation into the destruction of this plane off the coast of Long Island in 1996.
What is promising is that the video has been garnering respectable coverage in the mainstream media, and it deserves the attention. The producers, Tom Stalcup and Kristina Borjesson, made two strategic moves to force the media to look seriously at their conclusions. One was to rely heavily on the testimony of a half-dozen highly credible whistleblowers from within the investigation.
The second was to avoid politics. When James Sanders and I produced the video documentary Silenced on this subject twelve years ago and the book First Strike two years after that, we made the marketing mistake of identifying the logic of the cover-up. That logic led to the White House, just as it did with Benghazi. As this American Thinker article from November attests, the media did not want to go there any more in 1996 than they did in 2012.
If that were not vindication for one day, other emails led me to a new revelation by Bill Ayers that he did indeed write Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father. As he has before, he made something of a joke out of his admission, but he added new and convincing detail this time.
As Ayers told his inquisitors from Real Clear Politics, he had "written many books for many Hyde Parkers." Although he may have overstated his role, noted radical and former Hyde Parker Rashid Khalidi begins the acknowledgement section of his book, Resurrecting Empire, with this bit of praise: "First, chronologically and in other ways comes Bill Ayers." There were likely other fellow travelers in that world would have said the same thing.
Ayers claimed that he spent four months on the project, which sounds about right, and that he destroyed his notes at Obama's request, which also sounds about right. He acknowledged that a book had been written on his involvement in Dreams, but he couldn't "remember the guy's name" [moi] who wrote it, and that, unfortunately, sounds right too. The media have not helped refresh his memory.
As to the Zimmerman trial, George Z certainly ought not be convicted, and I predict he will not be. To find out why, check out If I Had A Son, due out soon after the trial ends.