The Audacity of Desperation

Some wingnut found a Weather Underground newsletter from 1975 (I didn’t know the Weather Underground was still around in 1975), and documents that the words “organizers,” “communities,” “audacity,” and “socialism” appeared in close proximity in the same paragraph.

Wow! This proves that Barack Obama is a Marxist! Oh, wait …

This paragraph from the newsletter actually frightened one of the commenters —

… the system itself is inhuman, and socialism is a real alternative; the energy crisis is the fault of Rockefeller and the oil companies, not the Arab people; unemployment is caused by capitalism not “illegal aliens” stealing jobs; war in Indochina or the Mideast is part of the problem, not the solution; political and social action can change things.

I’m not entirely sure why the wingnut found this disturbing. All of these issues were issues in 1975, as I remember. The Yom Kippur was was in 1973 and was still on peoples’ minds in 1975. Also in 1973 OPEC enacted an oil embargo on the U.S., which caused a lot of aggravation. In 1975 we had just pried ourselves out of a war in Indochina, but there was an ongoing war in Lebanon. Most of the issues we are facing now have been going on for a long time.

This post and the commenters also bring up the rumor that Bill Ayers must have ghost-written one of Barack Obama’s books, apparently based on the observation they both speak English and use some of the same words. The Times of London tells us that Robert Fox, a California businessman and brother-in-law of Chris Cannon, a Republican congressman from Utah, are connecting the dots. And if they can’t find dots to connect, they make some.

Fox contacted Dr. Peter Millican, a philosophy don at Oxford who wrote a software program that can detect when works are by the same author by comparing favorite words and phrases. Fox offered Millican $10,000 to prove that Ayers wrote Obama’s books.

Millican took a preliminary look and found the charges “very implausible”. A deal was agreed for more detailed research but when Millican said the results had to be made public, even if no link to Ayers was proved, interest waned.

Millican said: “I thought it was extremely unlikely that we would get a positive result. It is the sort of thing where people make claims after seeing a few crude similarities and go overboard on them.” He said Fox gave him the impression that Cannon had got “cold feet about it being seen to be funded by the Republicans”.

Cannon insisted, however, that he was not interested in making an issue of Obama’s memoir “even if it were scientifically proven” to be someone else’s work.

Of course not. The $10,000 was just to satisfy idle curiosity.

Update: Alert blogger Robert Farley of Lawyers, Guns & Money shows us the Obama-Ayers-Weather Underground conspiracy is broader than even I had imagined.

I don’t want to alarm anyone, but the term “audacity” also appears no less than twelve times in chapter seven alone of US Army Field Manual 3-0. This can only mean that the Weather Underground has already successfully seized control of the United States Army!!!!!11!!1! Has anyone investigated the connections between David Petraeus and Bill Ayers? No one is safe!!!

Further, the Weather Underground had a circular logo. So does Obama. So does Mozilla Firefox.

Is there no end to this?