Donald Trump, and now apparently Andrew Breitbart, have glommed onto Jack Cashill‘s rather laughable contention that the true author of Barack Obama‘s autobiography was former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers. Dave Weigel cites this paragraph in Breitbart’s new book:
In the past few years alone, citizen journalists have deposed Dan Rather for his scurrilous and baseless attacks on George W. Bush; exposed John Kerry‘s true war record during the 2004 election cycle; debunked Reuters’s photography fraud in the Middle East; raised the question whether Barack Obama’s autobiography, Dreams from My Father, was ghostwritten by domestic terrorist Bill Ayers; gotten rid of communist Van Jones; and the last goes on.
Weigel writes that this “tells you something about the collapse of trust in the media, if nothing else.” That’s a really odd way to look at it. Cashill has asserted, at various points, that Obama’s father might be Malcolm X or Jimi Hendrix. He was last seen touting a doctored photograph of Obama and his grandparents that failed to excise Obama’s knee from the picture when the rest of him was erased. “The media” sometimes gets it wrong, but Cashill gets it so laughably wrong that Breitbart’s willingness to believe him can’t really be blamed on a lack of “trust in the media”. It’s really more likely that Breitbart just wants to believe that Obama didn’t write his own book, just because.
Booktherism isn’t much different from birtherism, in that both take great leaps of logic to explain away the obvious in order to confirm a preordained conclusion based on racial stereotypes. The “this black person is too dumb to have written their own book” thing goes back to Phyllis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass, it’s the kind of accusation black “firsts” face almost as a matter of course. In Obama’s case, there’s a desperate need to explain away his obvious intelligence, from the obsession with his use of a teleprompter to referring to attempting to chalk up his rise to affirmative action.
