©Jack Cashill
WND.com - September 21, 2016

“Birtherism wasn’t the only conspiracy he pushed,” reads the subhead of a Huffington Post article this week by senior politics editor, Sam Stein.

The “he,” of course, refers to Donald Trump. The “conspiracy” that Stein rediscovered was Trump’s claim in 2011 that retired terrorist Bill Ayers helped Barack Obama write his esteemed 1995 memoir, “Dreams from My Father.”

“Bill Ayers was a super-genius,” Stein quotes Trump as saying on the Hannity Show. “And a lot of people have said he wrote the book. Well recently, as you know last week, Bill Ayers came out and said he did write the book.”

Says Stein of Trump’s claim, “All of this, of course, was rubbish.” Stein would seem to be a serious journalist. He has a masters in journalism from Columbia and has worked for Newsweek, the New York Daily News and the investigative journalism group Center for Public Integrity.

Given this background, one would think that Stein would have done some serious research before declaring the claim of a presidential candidate “rubbish.” This, I assure, you he did not do.

If he had started by Googling “Ayers,” “Obama”, “Dreams from My Father,” he would have gotten at least twenty thousand hits. The third listed of those hits is a 3500-word essay, “Who Wrote Dreams from My Father,” that I wrote in October 2008.

This essay followed several shorter pieces in WND in September 2008 that launched this particular “conspiracy.” In 2011, I wrote a book on the subject called “Deconstructing Obama.”

In fact, if Stein had done any research at all, he would have come across my name. If he did not have the time to read the book, he could have at least watched my presentation on C-SPAN’s Book-TV.

This is one of nine Book-TV presentations I have done. I will be doing my tenth this Saturday at the TWA Museum in Kansas City on my most recent book, TWA 800: The Crash, The Cover-Up, The Conspiracy.

In addition to the dozen books I have written, I have ghost written or collaborated on a dozen more. I know something about the ghostwriter’s craft, and, if matters, I have a Ph.D.

As a self-professed “deplorable,” however, I can understand why Stein would overlook the tons of evidence I gathered proving Ayers’s involvement.

Christopher Andersen is another story. An establishment journalist with credentials of the first order—Time, People, Vanity Fair--Andersen had written thirteen New York Times bestsellers in the twenty years before his 2009 book, “Barack and Michelle, Portrait of an American Marriage.”

This book was not a hit job, far from it. USA Today accurately described it as “a glowing 'Portrait' of the Obamas' rock-solid marriage.”

Andersen did not talk to me, but his sources in Chicago’s Hyde Park led him to the same conclusion I reached through analysis of the text.

As Andersen tells the story, Obama found himself deeply in debt in the early 1990s despite a generous book contract and “hopelessly blocked.”

At “Michelle’s urging,” Obama “sought advice from his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers.” What attracted the Obamas were “Ayers’s proven abilities as a writer.”

Noting that Obama had already taped interviews with many of his relatives, both African and American, Andersen elaborates, “These oral histories, along with his partial manuscript and a trunkload of notes were given to Ayers.”

Andersen spends six page of this otherwise benign book on the Ayers-Obama relationship. Scores of major media outlets reviewed Barack and Michelle, among them CBS News, USA Today, the Chicago Sun Times, the Seattle Times, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, the Chicago Tribune, and the Telegraph of London.

Yet incredibly, despite Andersen’s insights, despite the research I had done on this topic, I could not find a single one that so much as mentioned the “Dreams” controversy, the most newsworthy item in Andersen’s book. 

Stein assures us, “Multiple investigations had concluded that [Ayers and Obama] had a passing relationship and not much more.”

In writing his defamatory article on Trump, however, Stein limited himself to the “investigations” by his fellow travelers in the Obama-mad media and came up with happy talk. The late Christopher Hitchens understood the phenomenon.

“If you leave out absolutely everything that might give your ‘narrative’ a problem and throw in any old rubbish that might support it,” wrote Hitchens, “and you don’t even care that one bit of rubbish flatly contradicts the next bit, and you give no chance to those who might differ, than you have betrayed your craft.”

Hitchens was speaking about filmmaker Michael Moore. Today, his critique could be applied to virtually all of the major media, beginning with the esteemed Sam Stein.

I sent Stein a nice email on Monday offering to help educate him on this subject—and also on Ayers’s many claims to authorship, public and private. I am still waiting for my reply.

Jack Cashill’s newest book, TWA 800: The Crash, The Cover-Up, The Conspiracy, is available wherever you buy books.