Bleier on Cashill: Did Obama write Dreams from My Father

My  12 page, 4,000 world article,  “Jack Cashill’s Expose: Who wrote Obama’s Dreams from My Father?” 

 is available on the DESIP website.

 http://desip.igc.org/desip/ObamasDreams.html

 The article is the first of a proposed two- part essay under the heading: “Searching for Obama.”

Except for part of the first paragraph, the selections copied below are from the final sections of the article.

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Excerpts from:  

“Jack Cashill’s Expose: Who wrote Obama’s Dreams from My Father?”

                                                             by Ronald Bleier

In early 2011 on CSPAN’s Book TV program I watched author Jack Cashill present his controversial and startling theory regarding Obama’s memoir, Dreams from My Father (1995). Summarizing the findings he set out in his recently published Deconstructing Obama,[i] Cashill contended that Obama’s memoir was ghostwritten by Bill Ayers.

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Authorship of Dreams-- A Matter of Importance?

The  question of whether Dreams from My Father  was ghostwritten or not rose above the trivial for me because  by early 2011 I had come to believe that President Obama had been relentlessly pursuing an extremist right-wing Republican agenda.   In foreign policy he continued and escalated the destructive militarism of his predecessors revealing a lack of compassion and ruthlessness that rivaled his bloody predecessors. I felt that Oliver Stone was not exaggerating when he termed President Obama “a wolf in sheep’s clothing” referencing his militarism and his efforts to scuttle Constitutional rights of due process. Domestically Obama has promoted and continues to favor a damaging program of austerity and tax cuts, including the more than a trillion in tax cuts that he has already pushed through in 2009 and 2010[ii]; with apparently more to come in 2012-2013.

The argument is that if President Obama has pursued these policies with the full awareness of the consequences for the economy and for his re-election (see below) it can be deduced that counterintuitively he prefers a hobbled economy, a weakened Democratic Party, an undermined and demoralized middle class—his base-- in order to pursue a Republican agenda of attacks on labor, the middle class, Social Security and Medicare.

Similarly his escalation and continuation of the drone strike program in Pakistan and Yemen is particularly egregious and telling. Critics of these attacks often point out that that a chief consequence of the program which reportedly kills more civilians than “militants” by a factor or 2 or 3 or 4 or more, is to radicalize the local population and in the end, create more “terrorists.” In other words, if the purpose of the drone program is counterterrorism, then the program is counterproductive—not to speak of its appalling destruction and the perilous precedent it sets for the future security of all nations.

Since these effects must be as plain to the White House as they are to critics, the implication is that Obama’s “anti-terrorism” rhetoric masks a more sinister program. The drone program seems designed to allow free rein to the most militaristic and aggressive elements of the U.S.’s national security state, embodied in Obama’s hawkish national security advisor, John Brennan. The evident intention of the deadly drone attacks—not to mention other regular and special forces U.S. military operations-- is to wreak havoc and destabilize vulnerable areas of the world as part of an endless war agenda favored by extremist hawks, neoconservatives and others.

Does Obama really wish to be re-elected?

If President Obama is a faux Democrat, a serial traitor to his party and to his core supporters, then it would be understandable if he were not wholly comfortable in his high profile leadership role. A second term would, among other things, only widen his exposure as a fraud, as the great deceiver,[iii] as the more effective evil[iv] as some are beginning to see.  Developments in a post 2013 Obama administration would continue to peel away at the veils of his deception.  If he leaves office after only one term, he would be leaving, relatively speaking, at the top of his game. 

If he left the White House in January 2013 he need have no fear as to the continuation of his political program since he has already made giant strides in institutionalizing an extremist right wing and totalitarian agenda. Due to the terrible and groundbreaking precedents of the past decade and more, a real Republican like Mitt Romney should have little trouble persevering on the road to heightened national and international instability, global unsustainability and more rigorous control everywhere from the top.

One sign that Obama is not deeply committed to a second term would be if his re-election campaign machine turns out to be not as smoothly run as it was in 2008. Could his June 2012 political faux pas, when he allowed that “the private sector is doing fine” be a sign of a lack of focus or interest?  More such blunders, as well as a campaign lacking in direction, could be signs of Obama’s inner intentions.

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Read more:

 http://desip.igc.org/desip/ObamasDreams.html

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[i] Jack Cashill, Deconstructing Obama: The Life, Loves, and Letters of America’s First Postmodern President (2011).

http://www.booktv.org/Program/12215/Deconstructing+Obama+The+Life+Loves+and+Letters+of+the+First+Postmodern+President.aspx

CSPAN Book TV aired Jack Cashill’s book talk regarding his newly published, Deconstructing Obama in March 2011. The Book TV website offers the following summary of the Cashill presentation.

Jack Cashill questions whether President Obama wrote his memoir, Dreams from My Father.  Mr. Cashill argues that Barack Obama was assisted in the writing of his 1995 memoir by Bill Ayers and contends that the President's life story is different than the one presented in his biography.  Jack Cashill presents his argument at the Kansas City Public Library in Kansas City, Missouri.

[ii] Jack Rasmus, “Obama’s Economy,” Z Magazine, April 2012.

[iii] Yves Smith, “Barack Obama, the Great Deceiver,” May 14, 2012. (h/t Xymphora).

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/05/barack-obama-the-great-deceiver.html

[iv] Glenn Ford: Why Barack Obama is the More Effective Evil, 3.21.12,  http://blackagendareport.com/content/why-barack-obama-more-effective-evil

Jonathan Simon: Did Scott Walker really win his recall vote?

NYU professor, author and election fraud activist, Mark Crispin Miller, distributed the commentary below by Jonathan Simon on the Wisconsin/Scott Walker recall vote. The main points are that the exit polls are as fishy as the actual vote count which is managed in secret by Republican leaning vote counting companies. Author Jonathan Simon doesn't mention it, but the  paper ballots accompanying the voting machines are rendered meaningless when the winning margin isn't close. No problem if your side is doing the "counting."

My guess is that this election was stolen just as were the 2000 and the 2004 presidential elections to name just two.

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Jonathan Simon

With the exit polls—as usual—”adjusted,” Walker “wins” Wisconsin! (Who’s surprised?)

http://markcrispinmiller.com/

June 6, 2012

From Jonathan Simon:

What we got tonight in Wisconsin was the same old stench, coming from the same old corner of the room. To wit, there was a huge turnout (highly favorable to the Democratic candidate Barrett), in fact they’re still waiting in line to vote in Milwaukee and elsewhere nearly two hours after poll closing; and the immediate post-closing Exit Polls had it a dead heat, 50%-50%. But the only place those polls were posted was as
 a Bar Chart in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Not a single network posted any Exit Poll numbers, though they all have been regularly posting them throughout the 2012 primary season within a few minutes of poll closing. But they all called the race “extremely tight,” since they were looking at the same 50%-50% Exit Poll that the Journal Sentinel at least had the courage to post in some format.

In short order, and quite predictably, the race was Walker’s, the networks anointing him the winner as the Exit Poll “Adjustment” Process played out. You could actually see it on the Journal Sentinel’s Bar Chart: the blue bars shrinking and the red bars lengthening every 20
 minutes or so. It will take a bit of visual measuring but the adjustment process was egregious, on the order of an 8-10% marginal disparity between the Unadjusted Exit Polls and the Adjusted Exit Polls congruent to the eventually-to-be-announced “official results.”

We’ve seen this before, election after election, the familiar “Red Shift.” And it’s the Exit Polls that are always “off,” because the Votecounts must always be “on.” Except that the Votecounts are secret and in the full control of outfits, with strong right-wing affiliations, like Dominion Voting and Command Central. Votes counted by partisans in complete secret–is this sane?

Today massive robocalls were reported to have been placed to targeted Barrett supporters, telling them they didn’t have to vote if they had signed the recall petition, and others that they couldn’t vote if they hadn’t voted in 2010. An obvious question: is there a bright ethical line between making (whoever actually made them) targeted robocalls telling your opponents’ supporters they don’t have to vote if they signed
 the recall petition versus setting the zero-counters on a bunch of memory cards to, say, +50 (for Walker) and -50 (for Barrett) so at the end
 of the day the election admin sees a “clean” election and you’ve shifted 100 votes per precinct? Do you believe that operators who have clearly not blanched at doing the first would for some reason blanch at doing the second–much neater and more efficacious as it is?

And if you’re thinking “well the pre-election polls predicted a Walker win,” you should know that the methodology for all of those polls, even
 the ones run by left-leaning outfits, was the Likely Voter Cutoff Model (google it, by all means), which disproportionately eliminates Democratic voters (students, renters, poor, minority) from the sample and so skews it conveniently anywhere from 5% to 10% to the right (the pollsters
 all would have been out of business by now if they had kept using a sound methodology and getting competitive elections wrong with it).

This election was dubbed “the second most important election of 2012;” it will “foretell” November just as the Massachusetts Special Senate Election (Coakley-Brown) “foretold” November 2010. And there was a massive red shift and even more than the usual indicators that it was rigged. Can anyone live with that, just give it a pass, and sleep tonight?

–Jonathan Simon