Which moment or event is not phony or staged?
The White House press corps objected to a staged town hall where the questions put to Obama, as well as the questioners, were pre-screened and vetted in advance. Helen Thomas seemed really peeved that Obama manipulates the press so brazenly and thinks nothing of having Potemkin Village events like the so-called town meeting. The performance of Obama’s press secretary was smarmy. Frankly, this fellow makes our skin crawl.
And, in another matter, while we’re talking about elements of the carefully crafted but artificial public persona of the President, Jack Cashill is back on the case of whether Bill Ayers wrote Barack Obama’s first book, which we’ve previously discussed:
Within days of my going public last September with the speculation that terrorist emeritus Bill Ayers helped Barack Obama write his acclaimed memoir, Dreams From My Father, I learned that I was not alone in that intuition. Since then, I have received helpful contributions from serious people in at least five countries…
the first email I received from Mr. West had in the message box “759 striking similarities between Dreams and Ayers’ works.”…I was able to open them and was promptly blown away. Mr. West’s analysis was systematic, comprehensive, and utterly, totally, damning. Of the 759 matches, none were frivolous. All were C-level or above, and I had no doubt of their authenticity…
both authors evoke images of a “boy” riding on the backs of a “water buffalo” and prodding the beast not just with sticks, but with “bamboo sticks.” Ayers places his boy in Vietnam. Obama puts his in Indonesia…Obama and Ayers seem to have shared the same library…Both talk of reading the books of Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Dubois and Frantz Fanon among others. In fact, each misspells “Frantz” as “Franz.”
The water buffalo stories and the parallel libraries and author misspellings are highly suggestive. We’d normally consider it nutty to think that Ayers wrote Obama’s book. However so much of the public Obama seems staged and phony — except his desire to centralize power in himself and his disturbing identification with the world’s nasty authoritarian rulers — that we now wouldn’t be surprised if the allegations are true. Things could become interesting again in America if the press decided to regularly stand up on their hind legs as Chip Reid and Helen Thomas did with Gibbs.