Leave It to Believer.  Based on recent polls, Democrat strategist David Axelrod believes Joe Biden would be "wise" to drop out of the 2024 presidential race.  Axelrod comes billed as a "former Obama advisor," but that sells him short.  The New York Times hailed him as "Obama's narrator," and he signed off on his client's every word. [...] Axelrod describes Obama as a great writer with a novelist's eye.  Trouble is, Obama had no record of publication.  Obama's Weatherman pal Bill Ayers may have lent a hand, but David Axelrod shapes up as the principal author of Dreams from My Father.  In parts, the narrative bears striking similarities to I Dreamed of Africa and African Nights by Italian writer Kuki Gallmann.  A section in the early going recalls Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, and in many places the fakery leaps from the pages.  As David Garrow revealed in Rising Star: the Making of Barack Obama, the Dreams book is not an autobiography or memoir but "without question" a novel, and the author composite character in the story.  As Garrow recently told David Samuels that Obama "wants people to believe his story," and was infuriated when Garrow called out his book as fiction.  True to form, Axelrod's mark is all over Obama's A Promised Land, in the same elephantine, hagiographical style.

What Biographer Garrow Missed in His Obama Takedown.  [Scroll down]  In their conversation, Samuels and Garrow dance around another touchy subject, the unreality of Obama's literary genius.  Samuels, for instance, describes Obama's letters to Alex McNear as "poorly written."  He says of Dreams, however, "The whole book's really good."  Arguably, the letters are the best part of Obama's clunky pre-Dreams oeuvre, such as it was.  His one great solo effort, an 1800-word piece on nuclear disarmament as a senior at Columbia, rivals Michelle's misbegotten Princeton thesis for sheer awfulness.  No paper trail traces Obama's rise from sophomoric student writer to literary star.  In their conversation, neither Samuels nor Garrow addresses its absence.  As a way of self-protection, Obama guards his journals as zealously as he has his LSAT scores.  "He doesn't want the writerliness challenged," Garrows tells Samuels.  "It's my story and I'm sticking to it.  The book is so fictionalized.  It's so inaccurate."  On the right, this comes as old news.  In an October 2008 American Thinker article, "Who Wrote Dreams from My Father," I made the same point — Dreams was in no small part fabricated.  In this same American Thinker article, I introduced another likelihood, namely that terrorist emeritus Bill Ayers played a major role in the crafting of Dreams.

There's Something About Barry.  "Listen, can you imagine if I had had a secret Chinese bank account when I was running for re-election?  You think Fox News might have been a little concerned about that?  They would have called me Beijing Barry."  That was Barack Obama, campaigning in Pennsylvania for basement-bound Joe Biden, unable or unwilling to speak for himself, and perhaps ordered not to.  Anyone tuning in might wonder why ex-president Barack would refer to himself as "Barry."  As some may have forgotten, he did the same in his founding narrative, Dreams from My Father, way back in 1995.  At the outset, he is Barry, stepson of Lolo Soetoro, the Indonesian foreign student his mother Ann Dunham married in 1966.  By the end of the book Barry Soetoro has become Barack Obama, son of the Kenyan foreign student who died in a car accident in 1982.  The retooled Barack went on to become a U.S. senator and the 44th president of the United States.  A few months after he left office, official biographer David Garrow delivered a bombshell review of the president's founding narrative.  "Dreams from My Father was not a memoir or an autobiography; it was instead, in multitudinous ways, without any question a work of historical fiction (Garrows' italics).

Why the Media Chose Not to Hear When Trump Called Obama a Literary Fraud.  Barack Obama, the writer, is stumbling again.  Even the New York Times acknowledges that the former president is "anguishing over the publication date of his long-awaited memoir."  Others are anguishing even more than he.  "The delay is wreaking havoc with print scheduling and of course budget planning," an insider told me.  "The enormous advance is starting to raise concerns within the publisher.  While Michelle's book performed well, Obama needs to deliver the book and sales to make the overall deal worthwhile."  This is not the first time Obama failed to deliver on a book deadline.  In the summer of 1993, Simon & Schuster lost patience with Obama, canceled the contract it had awarded him two years earlier, and demanded the advance back.  To get out of debt and save his future, Obama had to do something.  Donald Trump knows just what that something was, and he has said so in public.

That 'silent coup' in the White House?  [Scroll down]  Forensic linguistics can tell us a lot more.  Example:  Obama's "biography," inked by his longtime conspirator and domestic terrorist pal Bill Ayers, was figured out from this technique.  Sailor and naval imagery appeared in that book repeatedly.  Obama has never been near the Navy or anything deeper than his own exorbitant inch-deep talents as magnificent orator and ne plus ultra wunderkind of magical etiology and education.  So Ayers was pinpointed, correctly, as the ghost for at least one Obama auto-bio.

New Obama Bio Is Not Just Exhausting; It's Insulting.  "Dreams from My Father was not a memoir or an autobiography;" writes Pulitzer Prize-winner David Garrow, "it was instead, in multitudinous ways, without any question a work of historical fiction."  Garrow makes this claim, italics included, in his massive new biography about Obama's pre-presidential years, Rising Star:  The Making of Barack Obama.  For myself and other citizen journalists who have followed Obama, this is hardly a revelation.  We concluded many years ago that Dreams was in large part fiction.

'The Profile in Courage Award' Is the Perfect Prize for Barack Obama.  On Thursday [3/2/2017], the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation named Barack Obama the 2017 "Profile in Courage" award honoree, and no one in the major media caught the irony of it.  According to the foundation, the award is given to those "whose actions demonstrate the qualities of politically courageous leadership in the spirit of 'Profiles in Courage,' President Kennedy's 1957 Pulitzer prize-winning book."  The reader should forget for a minute about Obama's alleged courage and focus instead on the phrase, "President Kennedy's 1957 Pulitzer prize-winning book."  This phrase would carry a little more weight, and the award would make a little more sense, if JFK actually wrote Profiles in Courage.  He did not.  In a similar vein, and here is where the irony comes into play, Barack Obama has been credibly accused of not writing in any meaningful way his own two books, Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope.

Nouns and Verbs and Obama Do Not Agree.  [Scroll down]  Unfortunately, others have also read Dreams along with the pathetic drivel that came from Obama's pen before Dreams.  One, the New York Times best-selling author Christopher Andersen wrote in his 2009 book that Obama, a "hopelessly blocked" writer facing a contract deadline, realized that he had taken on more than he could deliver.  So he turned to his Chicago neighbor, Bill Ayers, who was a proven writer, to finish what became Dreams.  Bill has remained relatively reticent about his work, but then he shares Obama's politics.  As for Andersen, he has sources that he has never divulged.  Maybe he will, when the former president snags his $30 million.  An even more interesting critic is Jack Cashill, a scholar and literary critic.  He actually read Obama's literary outpouring that came before Dreams.  Possibly this is what excited Michiko Kakutani, though Obama's "outpouring" was limited.  It consists of but two essays.  In all those years, just two essays.

New York Times Can't Stop Pushing the Myth of Obama's Literary Genius.  [Scroll down]  For years, Obama has encouraged this fiction.  "I've written two books," he told a crowd of teachers in Virginia in July of 2008.  The crowd applauded.  "I actually wrote them myself," he added with a wink and a nod, and now the teachers exploded in laughter.  They got the joke:  Republicans were too stupid to write their books.  No one much cared about Obama's second book, The Audacity of Hope, a policy brief written by committee and published in 2006.  It was his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, that emerged as the sacred text in the cult of Obama.  "There is no underestimating the importance of Dreams from My Father in the political rise of Barack Obama," New Yorker editor David Remnick would later write in his exhaustive look at Obama's life and career, The Bridge.  The problem, of course, is that Obama did not write either of his books in any meaningful way.

Remember When Hillary Clinton Accused Obama of Plagiarism?  Obama's plagiarism is of course fairly notorious and rarely discussed.  He's ripped off everyone right down to Jimmy Carter.  But this was one of the few times that someone from his party called him out on it.

Did Someone Mention 'Obama' and 'Plagiarism'?  Even if there were no other evidence, the frequent and sophisticated use of nautical terms in Dreams makes a powerful case for Ayers' involvement.  One passage in particular caught my attention.  Obama writes that for black nationalists, a steady attack on the white race "served as the ballast that could prevent the ideas of personal and communal responsibility from tipping into an ocean of despair."  As a writer, especially in the pre-Google era of Dreams, I would never have used a metaphor as specific as "ballast" unless I knew exactly what I was talking about.  Seaman Ayers most surely did.  Andersen based his account of Dreams' creation on two unnamed sources within Hyde Park.  As Andersen tells it, Obama found himself deeply in debt 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" as evident in his 1993 book, To Teach.  The media, however, could not bring themselves to question any of this.  In recognizing Obama's unique genius, they validated their own.  They have so much emotional equity staked in this recognition that they would rather believe Obama a failed president than a fraudulent human being or a fake writer.

War-Weary Obama Takes Break From President Job To Write 4,221-Word, 68-Reference Academic Treatise.  Taking his cue from Romanian tyrant-spouse Elena Ceausescu, who tried to get people to believe she had written a 162-page doctoral dissertation in polymer chemistry, President Barack Obama has totally published a scholarly article about health-care reform in The Journal of the American Medical Association.  The prestigious journal published Obama's article, entitled "United States Health Care Reform:  Progress to Date and Next Steps," earlier this week.  The 4,221-word academic manuscript, which features 68 references and half a dozen handy charts, comes at a time when Obama is facing a number of thorny domestic and international issues, as well as various crises.

Obama is not a scientist.  JAMA shouldn't pretend he is.  The Journal of the American Medical Assn. recently published a very unusual article:  a scientific study authored by a sitting president of the United States.  That's never happened before.  In a sense, it's cool that President Obama cares enough about science to want to publish a paper in one of the world's leading medical journals.  But JAMA has set a bad precedent.  The article, on healthcare reform in the United States, is problematic not only in its content but in the threat it poses to the integrity of scientific publishing.  Let's set aside the debate on whether the specific numbers in the article are factual.

The Editor says...
No, let's not set that aside at all.  In all likelihood, the numbers are deliberately misleading.  Nor should one blindly accept the assertion that Obama wrote the article himself.

Media Outraged Over Obama Plagiarizing Speech.  Apparently Donald Trump's wife, Melania, lifted some lines from a speech someone wrote for Michelle Obama.  We just hope the Democrats who are pouncing don't overreach, especially since their man also did the same thing himself.  [Video clip]

Obama's Ghostwritten Book Draft Released By WeSearchr.  The new media startup WeSearchr has released a draft of Barack Obama's first book proving he did NOT write the book. [...] The draft was obtained from Obama's brother and former best man Malik Obama.  Written notes and sticky notes all over the pages indicate large portions of the book were NOT written by Obama.  One section is marked "Ink by Obama," and others say not Obama on them.  Obama has always maintained that he wrote his books by himself.

What the Unearthed 1995 Video Tells Us about Obama.  [Scroll down]  Obama did not write Dreams unaided.  In listening to Obama speak, one could not help but note the stark difference between the eloquence of the words he read and the tortured syntax of the words he spoke.  Sentences like "Most black folks always have an open hand to individual whites" were not unusual in his talk.  What is more, in answering a question on how he organized his writing, Obama could not quite get his story straight.  He never can.

The Walker-Stupid, Obama-Genius Myth.  Since nothing Obama has done as president reflects anything like brilliance, the myth of his genius continues to rest on two pre-election assumptions, both unchallenged by the major media.  One is that Obama alone wrote his 1995 autobiography Dreams from My Father, "the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician" according to Time's Joe Klein.  The second is that Obama deserved to be president of the Harvard Law Review.  For those interested in the first question I would recommend my book, Deconstructing Obama.  As the record will show, Obama was incapable of writing that book on his own. [...] As to the second question, no, Obama did not deserve to become president of the Harvard Law Review, let alone to be admitted to Harvard, Columbia University, or even Occidental College.  Friendly biographer David Remnick tells us that Obama was an "unspectacular" student in his two years at Columbia and at every stop before that going back to grade school.

Former Bush Speechwriter: Obama Plagiarized Bush's 2007 SOTU speech.  Following President Barack Obama's State of the Union address on Tuesday, former George W. Bush speechwriter Mark Thiessen told Fox News Channel's "The Kelly File" host Megyn Kelly that Obama's speech plagiarized lines from Bush's 2007 speech, for which he said he was the lead speechwriter.

Borrowed Eloquence.  Is Barack Obama really the somewhat interesting guy who wrote Dreams From My Father?  I doubt it.  I don't say Bill Ayers necessarily wrote the book, but I doubt that it was Obama.  He has yet to formulate a political thought in an even slightly original way.  Hackneyed phrases and deadening cliches are the essential medium of his expression.  His speeches are like New York Times editorials.

How Author Obama Foreshadowed President Obama.  [Scroll down]  The New York Times' Michiko Kakutani described the second book, Audacity of Hope, "as much more of a political document.  Portions of the volume read like outtakes from a stump speech."  They sound like "outtakes from a stump speech" precisely because they were, in fact, outtakes from a stump speech.  My colleagues and I found 38 passages from Obama speeches delivered in 2005 or 2006 that appear virtually word for word as ordinary text in Audacity.  Of the 38 speech passages, the Obama faithful are forced to believe that Obama wrote all of them.  It seems much more likely, however, that young speechwriter Jon Favreau wrote these speeches.

The Liars Club.  He has lied from the start of his political life, which began not that long ago.  For instance when he informed an audience of teachers in July 2008 on the campaign trail "I've written two books — I actually wrote them myself."  It was a lie.  He has never written an eloquent line in his life, and those two books were professionally written.  He speaks with the assistance of Teleprompters.  His rhetoric is formulaic.  At best, he counseled with a couple of ghostwriters to write the books that bear his name. [...] Writers from as varied backgrounds as Jack Cashill, the conservative journalist, to Obama's popular biographer, Christopher Andersen, author of Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage, have adduced evidence refuting Obama's claim to authorship of his books.  Last week Investor's Business Daily cast still more doubt on Obama's claim to have "written two books."

Bill Ayers' Role in Obama Book Questioned Again.  Questions are being raised again about the role Bill Ayers, a former radical activist turned elementary-education theorist, played in the writing of President Barack Obama's bestselling memoir, "Dreams From My Father."  Ayers, a 1969 co-founder of the self-described communist revolutionary group Weather Underground, is now promoting his new book, "Public Enemy," and his publisher is using suggestions that Ayers wrote the president's book in its publicity material, Investor's Business Daily reports.

Terrorist Ayers Confesses Sharing Obama's 'Dreams'.  We know ObamaCare was sold on a lie, but what about the Obama presidency itself?  Rumors that Obama's violent leftist pal Bill Ayers ghostwrote the memoir that launched his political career may actually be true.  Obama has always claimed authorship of his bestselling "Dreams From My Father."  But Ayers is telling a different story.

The United States Constitution vs. Barack Obama.  Before becoming president, Barack Obama authored not just one, but two biographies, making him millions of dollars. [...] Literary analysis performed by an expert at detecting forgery and fraud points to the strong possibility that Obama's biographies were written by ghostwriters.  Additional evidence shows that the ghost writer for Dreams from My Father may very well have been unrepentant socialist terrorist and then-contemporary English professor William Ayers of the Weather Underground.

How the Media Ignored Obama's Lies About His Own Biography and Memoir.  Liberal journalists — especially hacks like Chris Matthews at MSNBC — routinely disparage conservatives for the "birthers" and their conspiracy theories that Obama can't be president because he wasn't born in the United States. [...] But the public should see the entire national media as a pack of "mythers" — people who blithely accepted Obama's concocted life story without challenging the factual reliability of any of it.

The Endgame for the Destruction of the United States.  The connections between Barack and Bill include having shared an office for at least three years in Chicago, being co-members on two boards in which Barack was the chairman, and one of which was called the Annenberg Challenge[, which] was charged with the dissemination of approximately $100 million to educational institutions in the Chicago area.  Bill Ayers has been associated with the writing of Barack's book, Dreams from My Father, through content analysis, and on three occasions Bill has admitted that he wrote this book and then later retracted his comments.

Lance and Barack: the Content of their Characters.  In trying to discern the content of Obama's character, many people start with the stories told in the book Dreams from My Father.  This book purports to have been written by Obama, and is assumed to be a non-fiction autobiographical work.  As a hypothetical question, if it were to be proved with mathematical certainty, even metaphysical certitude, that it is impossible for Obama to be the author of this book, would that not provide significant insight into some of the enormous character flaws in Obama?  Several years ago I proved just that.

Let's Ask Obama About His Made-Up Girlfriends.  Although I and others in the blogosphere had made the case early on that the girlfriends Obama wrote about in his memoir Dreams from My Father were not real, the major media ran from the story.

Plagiarism in The Audacity of Hope?  [W]hether these examples justify a charge of plagiarism, I leave to the discretion of the reader.  But at the very least, The Audacity of Hope is yet another example among many of Obama's penchant for lifting passages from others without attribution.

Obama's Apocryphal Kenya Trip.  In 1994 or early 1995 the still unknown Barack Obama sent his editor at Times Books, Henry Ferris, the first two-thirds of his memoir Dreams from My Father.  He told Ferris that to complete the book, he had to return to Kenya to do some research.  The evidence strongly suggests that Obama went not to Kenya to do that research but to the local library to do some borderline plagiarizing.

Somewhat related:
Obama's half-brother writes memoir contradicting 'Dreams from my Father'.  Barack Obama's Ivy-League educated half-brother is publishing his autobiography next month, painting a dramatically different picture of their few meetings from the one the president related in his best-selling 'Dreams from My Father' memoir.  Mark Obama Ndesandjo includes an appendix in his book, cataloguing what he says are factual errors in 'Dreams' — including words falsely attributed to his mother, a Jewish woman named Ruth.  'A lot of the stuff that Barack wrote is wrong in that book, and I can understand that,' he told the Associated Press last year when he planned to self-publish his book.  'To me,' Ndesandjo said then, 'for him the book was a tool for fashioning an identity and he was using composites.  I wanted the record to be straight.  I wanted to tell my own story, not let people tell it for me.'

This is an original compilation, Copyright © 2023 by Andrew K. Dart

Putting the 'Christ' Back in Christmas.  President Donald Trump added a radical twist to the annual National Christmas Tree Lighting ceremony last Friday by invoking the divinity of Jesus Christ.  You would think revering the season's central figure would be expected, but you'd be wrong.  Although his predecessor, Barack Obama, mentioned the Nativity in general terms as "the story of a child born far from home ... who'd ultimately spread a message that has endured for more than 2,000 years," the more direct Trump went right to the sacred heart of the matter.

People Are Freaking Out Because Obama Just Said 'Merry Christmas'.  Just days after the the president sent out his last Christmas card while in office — which failed to mention Christmas at all — he wished everyone a merry one as he opened up his last news conference of the year on Friday.

Obama Cites Scripture To Defend School Bathrooms Rule.  President Barack Obama defended his decision to open up bathrooms to students of both sexes based on preference, citing his religious faith as a reason he decided to do it.  "My reading of scripture tells me that that [the] Golden Rule is pretty high up there in terms of my Christian belief," he said during a town hall in Elkhart, Indiana.  Local resident Arvis Dawson questioned Obama during the event, wondering why the president decided to make it such an issue.  "What happened and what continues to happen is you have transgender kids in schools and they get bullied and they get ostracized and it's tough for them," Obama said, saying that in the past, students were forced to suffer silently.

Obama: Jesus cures fear.  President Obama used his last address at the National Prayer Breakfast Thursday [2/4/2016] to discuss overcoming fear by embracing faith.  "For God has not given us a spirit of fear but of power and of love and of a sound mind," Obama read from 2 Timothy 1:7, saying that it's a verse that has resonated with him lately.

Obama Says That All Faiths Share Same 'Bedrock Values' Taught by Jesus Christ.  While lighting the National Christmas Tree in Washington, D.C., on Thursday [12/3/2015], President Barack Obama said that the "lessons of Jesus Christ" are in not just the lessons of the Christian faith but are in fact "the bedrock values of all faiths."  "That's the message of the child whose birth families like mine celebrate on Christmas — a prince born in a stable who taught us that we should love our neighbors as ourselves; and that we are our brothers' keeper and our sisters' keepers; that we should feed the hungry, visit the sick, welcome the stranger," Obama said.

Obama's Amazing Disgrace of a Eulogy.  After complimenting the deceased pastor/senator's character, Obama, just short of breaking into the Holy Ghost shuffle, went into his mediocre black-minister impression with talk of the "deeds and not just words" that the man who's always talking and never doing believes Christian faith to be.  Bordering on heresy, Obama elevated the falsehood of collective salvation, and buoyed by the echoing chorus of "Yes!" and "Amen!" stressed that a community is made socially just by feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and sheltering the homeless.  Charity is the Church's vocation.  Barack Obama's problem is his belief that government-supervised acts of charity are the responsibility of the First Church of Bureaucracy and should be religiously supported by the tithes and offerings forcibly taken from the American taxpayer.

Meaning of 'one nation under God' died with decision.  [God is] good to have on your side in an argument, as President Obama demonstrated yesterday in South Carolina, trolling for easy applause by telling the congregation at Pastor Clementa Pinckney's funeral that the Confederate flag must come down.  "By taking down that flag," he declared, "we express God's grace."  Really?  Don't we do the same thing by honoring what He ordained a marriage to be, a union of one man and one woman in which "the two become as one"?

Obama Promotes Policy With 'Conservative Folks' Reading Bible, Saying 'That Ain't Right'.  During President Obama's tenure, religious Americans have been increasingly marginalized by an administration that can be intolerant or at least unaccomodating of beliefs that conflict with its policies, regulations, or legislative goals.  Perhaps most notably, President Obama campaigned by expressing support for traditional marriage, more than once citing his Christianity as the basis for his position, a position he later "evolved" away from.  This has not stopped the president, however, from invoking scripture in support of other items on his agenda. [...] President Obama recently attempted to use the Bible in support of his immigration initiatives, with mixed success.

Faith and the President.  What I see of the President reflected in the world is a man who used his faith as a lie to claim he opposed gay marriage when he really did not; who spoke out in favor of allowing abortionists to kill children who survive abortions; who has actively promoted abortion in his Presidency; who has publicly used the courts to curtail the free exercise of religion paring it down to a right to worship; who, when he thought he was off the record, mocked Christians bitterly clinging to guns and religion, etc., etc., etc.  In fact, that ultimately is it.  The President, when he thought he was off the record and in the advancement of his political agenda, has been no friend to the church and its orthodox teachings.  He trots out religion publicly as a political tool to help himself, not others.

Obama tells supporters they are doing "God's work".  President Barack Obama rallied his political base Tuesday night [2/25/2014], speaking to those attending a summit hosted by Organizing for Action, a group that pushes his policy agenda.  "The work you're doing is God's work," he told hundreds of supporters at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel.