Topic: WorldNetDaily
Jack Cashill is still spouting his silly little conspriacy that William Ayers ghost-wrote Barack Obama's book "Dreams of My Father." In his May 28 WorldNetDaily column, he touts how right-wing videographer Kerry Picket (formerly with the Media Research Center's EyeBlast video site, now with the Washington Times) asked Ayers if he wrote the book. Ayers unsurprisingly laughed it off.
Cashill then complained that David Weigel of the Washington Independent wrote about the incident (an article Cashill curiously does not link to) by linking to a early article Cashill wrote promoting his conspiracy -- which even Cashill calls "admittedly speculative" -- and ignoring "much more recent and comprehensive articles" on the subject. Cashill then asserts: "The evidence in these articles of Obama's limited skills and Ayers' involvement is irrefutable, which likely accounts for Ayers' uncomfortable response to Picket's question."
Well, no. As we've detailed, Peter Millican, a philosophy don at Oxford who was offered $10,000 by right-wingers to prove Cashill's little conspiracy theory pretty much shot it down: "The trouble with these sorts of claims is that they are far too easy to make: take any two substantial memoirs from the same era and you are likely to be able to pick out a fair number of passages that have some similarities. Unless the similarities are really close (and they weren't), just listing them makes no case at all, even if it might be enough to persuade some readers."
(Cashill didn't take that well, of course, baselessly asserting that Millican's analysis was "so shabby and slapdash that it had me checking Britain's famous libel laws before I was halfway through." )
Cashill then complains that another blogger, Washington Monthly's Steve Benen, "picked up on Weigel's lead and ran with it" and, even worse, said the conspiracy was "peddled by unhinged right-wing activists during the presidential campaign." Cashill (who doesn't link to Benen's post either) unsurprisingly didn't take that well either:
After reading Benen's piece, I e-mailed him under the server message, "Unhinged right-wing activist weighs in."
"Steve," I wrote, "I am the originator of the 'bizarre conspiracy theory' that Ayers was involved in the writing of 'Dreams From My Father.' I can understand how such a theory may seem bizarre, but the evidence is overwhelming."
I then sent him a link to the most recent article on my site and said, "I would welcome your fair evaluation." I have not heard back from him.
This, of course, does not surprise me. The last thing Obama's acolytes want to see is evidence of his fallibility.
Or maybe Benen knows better to deal with a man who still thinks his conspiracy theory is valid long after it was discredited.
