The conservative blogosphere deserves to win a collective Pulitzer Prize for its election-year coverage….

Since I make my living as a writer, I can tell you that the most important part of my job is being able to switch between many different voices given the situation. And as a writer, lecturer, etc., Cashill knows this.

So there’s a reason why Dreams is a completely different style of writing than Audacity. Audacity was directed at a broader, political audience, while Dreams was a memoir. These are two VERY distinct forms of writing.

And as far as going from 0 to 60 in his early writings to Dream, what Alan said. History is LITTERED with brilliant first novels. But yeah, you keep believing that Ayers wrote Dreams because he has vaguely similar word choices in his books.

As for misrepresenting Cashill’s “argument”, he began with a ridiculous premise and then spends the entire rest of the article cherry picking his way through both books to make his point. It’s conspiratorial jealousy in its worst form, and Cashill should be ashamed of himself.

Meanwhile, you have Ayers extensive writing portfolio, which without question is much more similar to Dreams than “Dreams” is to “Audacity”. The length of sentences, imagery, philosophy (post modern), reading level, etc. are almost identical between “Fugitive Days” (Ayers memoir) and “Dreams” (Obama’s memoir).

I highly recommend that people read Cashill’s ENTIRE article in American Thinker before discarding his thesis on the basis of two paragraphs that have been taken out of context. Cashill’s argument is a thorough and layered argument against Obama being the primary author of Dreams, but Obama could show it was false by showing even one thing he’d authored prior to Dreams, no matter how short, that showed any signs of the literary ability exhibited in that book.

So, the question is, who wrote it. If you look at what was going on with Obama and Ayers at the time the book was written, Ayers is indeed an excellent candidate (means, motive, similarity and uniqueness of writing style, etc.). Perhaps it was someone else, but who? At this point, Ayers is a pretty good hypothesis.

Even if it’s not Ayers, though, the revelation that Obama does not indeed have the literary skill displayed in Dreams is a major indictment of his character.

http://althouse.blogspot.com/2008/10/jack-cashills-strange-notion-that-bill.html

Obviously, Buckley doesn’t like the neo-cons, but his stance against them is not made in the name of any of the other conservative stance (paleo or otherwise) that have ALWAYS disliked the Neocons. (The paleos suspect them of all being closet Leninists, and indeed there is a little bit of “export the revolution!” about them.) So what is Chris Buckley conservatism? Well, whatever it is it isn’t very conservative if he can find its embodiment in Barack Obama.

Actually, by real standards, I’d say Buckley is about as conservative as Andy Sullivan, which is to say not-conservative at all…although in different way and for different reasons. (If one were to be completely uncharitable one might term it less principled and more bandwagonesque.) Indeed, in Buckley’s piece you link to and quote above you get trenchant criticism of the neocons, but not a single annunciation of a conservative theme as a better choice (and there are lots of other options.) That Buckley cannot bring one to mind says more about beliefs he actually holds today.

As for the text analysis…no, what he uses is different. The work I saw was by David Hoover at NYU, which can be used for author attribution. (It creates a “fingerprint” based upon word choice and other usage characteristics. I’ve no idea how the QUSM program he mentions works…and I’m not sure I care.)

Uh, I know Chris Buckley

Rich…are you saying that he’s lying? This is how his article starts out…

Let me be the latest conservative/libertarian/whatever to leap onto the Barack Obama bandwagon.

As far as the computer program, Cashill does run it through one of these and says they’re virtually identical when it comes to the reading level. Don’t know if that’s what you’re talking about or not. But I’d suggest you read the article.

My point was simply that the article starts off with a ludicrous premise and so pretty much everything after that is called into question. However, somebody at the National Review actually calls it thoughtful, thorough, etc., and that’s what’s sad.

As for Obama’s book. There are computer programs that can compare samples of writing and make an estimate at the likliehood they were written by the same author. (Saw it on History Detectives). This is easily solved by running them through that. It need not remain a matter of blind opinion.

DOH!

Agnostick
agnostick@excite.com

It’s pretty comical. It will in a few weeks be matched by the comedy of orgiastic, messianic liberal celebrations expressing pure joy and 100% faith that Obama can just fix everything with a wave of his hand.

It makes great theater, and I plan to keep enjoying it all. But both sides are way off. WAY off.

Thanks for the laugh.