How bizarrely obsessed with Barack Obama is WorldNetDaily columnist Jack Cashill? He managed to twist a controversy about Republican South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem’s book into an anti-Obama screed. His May 15 column began this way:
The New York Times headline says it all, “Kristi Noem’s New Book Falsely Says She Met Kim Jong-un.” That new book is her ill-fated memoir “No Going Back.”
Given the possibility that the attractive 52-year-old South Dakota governor is, as the Times reminds us, “a potential running mate for former President Donald J. Trump,” the corporate media went after Noem like a dog who had eaten their chickens.
Meanwhile, back at his Martha Vineyard’s redoubt, former President Barack Obama is rocking back on his porch swing, thinking, “Kristi, darling, hold my beer.”
In his 1995 bestselling memoir, “Dreams from My Father,” Barack Obama raised the art of memoir mendacity to a level that would make even Joe Biden cringe.
From there, Cashill went on to rehash his conspiracy theories about the book and whine that they didn’t make him famous:
As Obama ascended to a national stage after the 2004 Democratic convention, it became an unwritten rule among the literati that fact-checking “Dreams” was strictly verboten.
I learned this the hard way. When I first revealed on these pages that not only was the book chock full of imagined incidents, but that it was also heavily doctored by unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers, I got nowhere.
Every major conservative print publication turned me down in the fall of 2008 when it mattered. History pivoted on that failure of will.
In 2009, with Obama safely elected, the literary world began to quietly acknowledge that they had enabled a massive literary fraud.
In his friendly biography, “Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage,” celebrity biographer Christopher Andersen acknowledged that “literary devices and themes [in ‘Dreams’] bear a jarring similarity to Ayers’ own writings.”
As we’ve pointed out, one of Andersen’s sources for this claim about the book was Cashill himself, so he’s engaging in circular logic by bringing this up. By contrast, a British professor using a software program to detect similar words and phrases between works found that it was “very implausible” that Ayers wrote Obama’s book. Needless to say, Cashill attacked the professor for debunking his pet conspiracy theory.
Cashill went on to whine that “What amazes in retrospect is how Obama found the nerve to tell so flagrantly dishonest a story. Having a dependably obliging media surely fortified his spine.” But Obama’s book explicitly noted that he used composite characters.
Then again, factual reality hasn’t exactly stopped Cashill from obsessing about Obama before this. And despite using Noem’s book as a launching pad for yet another anti-Obama screed, Cashill is silent about the real controversy over Noem’s book: her tale of shooting a dog, which is generally believed to have also killed any hope she had of being Donald Trump’s vice president.