© Jack Cashill

When historians tell the story of the 2008 election a century hence, they will tell how the ABETTO factor—A Blind Eye To The Obvious—finally undid America’s once proud journalism establishment.

The following passage, one of the very few in the major media to condescend to the question of Barack Obama’s altogether likely literary fraud, nicely captures the blindness.

“The bizarre accusation Jack Cashill made . . . that Obama didn't write "Dreams From My Father" (and that Bill Ayers did) has caught fire in the blogosphere and on talk radio.”

So writes the proudly clueless Kirsten Powers in the only half-blind New York Post. The New York Times, at least, did not attack me. Nor did they see fit to cover the story.

Wrote I to a Times’ contact, one of that paper’s more open minded reporters, “We have had four independent authorities confirm Ayers authorship of Dreams, awaiting the results from the fifth, a Brit and arguably the world's leading authority. I am attaching a summary.  I can convince anyone if I get an audience.”

Wrote the reporter back, “I interviewed Peter Osnos, who was then the publisher of Times Books which published Dreams. He adamantly denies that Obama had any help writing the book from anyone, including Ayers.”

She adds, “I will ask the editors in DC if they still want to pursue your findings.”

Wrote I in return, “All you have to do is read what Obama wrote before 1995 and compare it to Dreams.  Obama did not write the good parts of that book.”

“Besides, I have found at least three stories that Obama tells in Dreams that Ayers told in his books, changed only minimally,” I continued.  “My publisher does not have a clue as to who wrote my books, neither does my editor.”

Needless to say, the New York Times did not see fit to pursue my findings. I rather wished they had. The Oxford study is being held up over money issues. The Times should have commissioned its own studies.

So, for that matter, should have the “respectable” conservative media. Any one of them might have pursued this story to test the strength of it. None of them bothered.

Into this breach steps the London Times. What attracted them to the story was the failure of supportive fundraisers to muster enough funds to liberate the study by Oxford professor, Peter Millican. The intellectual property guardians at Oxford apparently won’t take a down payment and an IOU.

What might just keep the London Times in this story is the transparency of Obama’s fraud. One does not have to be a forensic linguist to spot it. Indeed, my single best source to date has been a 39 year-old father of three who runs a small construction business in the Midwest.

Joe the Builder—given Joe the Plumber’s fate he prefers to remain anonymous--spotted at least two of the stories that bleed from the 1993 Ayers’ book “To Teach” into the 1995 Obama book “Dreams From My Father.”

Yesterday, I received an email from a Boston-area writer and composer, Jay Spencer, who suggested some other parallels between Obama’s “Dreams” and Ayers’ books that had evaded me. They smack even the casual reader in the face.

Remember that the young Ayers served as a merchant seaman, and although he has tried to put his ocean-going days behind him, the language of the sea will not let him go.

“I realized that no one else could ever know this singular experience,” Ayers writes of his maritime adventures. Yet curiously, much of this same nautical language flows through Obama’s earth-bound memoir.

Although there are no literal sea experiences in “Dreams,” the following words, incredibly enough, appear in both Dreams and in Ayers’ work: fog, mist, ships, seas, boats, oceans, calms, captains, charts, first mates, storms, streams, wind, waves, barges, horizons, ports, panoramas, moorings, tides, currents, and things howling, fluttering, knotted, ragged, tangled, and murky.

This is well beyond coincidence. By contrast, only the words “current” and “tide” appear in my own semi-memoir on race, “Sucker Punch.”

Not surprisingly, two of the more conspicuous parallel structures that Spencer discovered involve elements that intrigue Ayers—water and language.

Writes Ayers in his memoir “Fugitive Days”: “The debates swam above and around and through us . . . . The confrontation in the [Student Union] flowed like a swollen river in to the teach-in, carrying me along the cascading waters from room to room, hall to hall, bouncing off boulders.”

Writes Obama in “Dreams”: “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, but always the voices returning to that single course, a single story.”

I would bet my house against Obama’s mailbox that the gifted writer Ayers wrote both these passages.

Now, note the rhythm, cadence, and layered structure of the following two excerpts, both dealing with waves.

Writes Ayers in “A Kind And Just Parent”: “The hard ground is frozen through, the wintry waves upswept - all white and frosty - transposed in midcrash from furious motion to arctic glass. A fading, fragile sun offers no heat and precious little light to our dark smudge of a city nestled between Lake Michigan and the vast, flat plains stretching westward.”

Writes Obama in “Dreams”: “The trembling blue plane of the Pacific. The moss-covered cliffs and the cool rush of Manoa Falls, with its ginger blossoms and high canopies filled with the sounds of invisible birds. The North Shore's thunderous waves, crumbling as if in a slow-motion reel. The shadows off Pali's peaks; the sultry scented air.”

No one who has seen Obama’s earlier writing or paid heed to his casual speech could make a serious case that Obama wrote either of these passages.

What is truly “bizarre”—no, disgraceful—is that the major media are not all over this story. Thank you, London Times, for at least listening.

Who is Jack Cashill?