The Conservative Crack-Up Deepens

With the Republican Party experiencing a full-blown implosion, conservatives are grasping at straws in a desperate effort to bring down Barack Obama.

The latest fashionable right-wing conspiracy theory: Obama didn't write his memoir, Dreams from My Father, Bill Ayers did!

You can't make this stuff up -- or, if you're a writer for the fringe website the American Thinker (a major promulgator of numerous Obama smears) I suppose you can. One of its contributors, Jack Cashill, compared Obama's memoir with Ayers' Fugitive Days and concluded that only the former Weatherman could've authored Obama's book (even though, for starters, Obama got the contract for his book in 1990 and didn't meet Ayers until 1995, the year his memoir came out).

Normally I'd just ignore such bogus drivel, except that Cashill's smear was picked up by Andy McCarthy of National Review, which still enjoys (perhaps unfairly) a modicum of respectability.

"Did Obama Write Dreams from My Father ... Or Did Ayers?" asked McCarthy on Saturday. "I don't want to feed into what sounds, at first blush, like Vince Fosteresque paranoia," McCarthy writes, and then goes on to do just that. (In case you've forgotten, some conservatives accused Bill Clinton of murdering his longtime friend, Vince Foster, in 1993.)

McCarthy's rant was too much for fellow National Review contributor Jonathan Adler, the director of the Center for Business Law and Regulation at Case Western University, to handle. Wrote Adler:

C'mon Andy. Giving credence to Jack Cashill's maybe-Ayers-wrote-Obama's-book theory is a bit much. This is even more outlandish than his stuff alleging a possible connection between Enron and Ron Brown's death. Even if Obama's book was ghost-written -- -and I've seen no evidence that it was -- fingering Ayers as the potential author is nutter-territory stuff.

I resisted reading Cashill's analysis for a long time -- -and he's not the first to advance the idea that Obama did not write his book -- because I didn't want to be accused of wading into what could be taken as nutter stuff. I was then persuaded that I should at least look at it with an open mind. I'm convinced it raises major questions. I tried to treat them in a serious way. I expected to get gruff, but I did hope it wouldn't come from my own (diminishing) ranks. But such is the way it is these days.

It's still a giant leap to Cashill's suggestion that Ayers was the actual writer of Obama's book, his "analysis" notwithstanding. There are more serious issues at stake, and we can do better than that.