Hear Bill Ayers say again, 'I wrote Obama bio' (Corsi prompts "non-ironic" declaration)

Very few adult Americans are so ignorant that they mispronounce the word “corpsman.”

I disagree.

I would even bet that about 47% of the population, if they saw that word, would pronounce it the same as Obama did.

Many of them are the same people who when they see the word "ASK", pronounce it as "AXE".

I would further venture that the average High School Graduate would not pronounce it properly, and if you pronounced the word and asked (sorry, AXED) them to spell it, they would spell it "COREMEN".

If you have some children, pronounce the word to them and ask them to spell it. You might be surprised by the answer you get.

Now, back to the subject of whether the post-Harvard Obama cd write his way out of a wet paper bag. First, is he sufficiently proficient w grammar to tackle a book-length project? Well, here’s a very sm, limited list of just a few of his grammatical triumphs:

‘“Well, first of all, I do continue to believe that the greatest threat to United States security are the terrorist networks like al Qaeda …”

“Obviously, our efforts to continue to go after extremist organizations that would do harm to the homeland is uppermost on our minds.”

“Good morning, Marines … Diplomacy and assistance is also required to help the millions of displaced Iraqis.”

“Our families, our businesses, and our long-term fiscal health demands that we act and act now.”

“Each of these institutions are full of honorable men and women doing important work that helps our country prosper.”

“I know, I like Frank, we’ve had conversations between Frank and I.”

“… my conversation with Sergeant Crowley, there was discussion about he and I and Professor Gates having a beer here in the White House.”

“I have to say that nobody was more surprised than me about winning the Nobel Prize for peace.”

These grammatical blunders represent only the tip of the Obama iceberg.’

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2012/08/16/NYT-Ripped-Bush-Grammar-mistakes-ignores-obamas

But when it comes to writing itself, here is my personal favorite:

“Law week, two men, Richard and Michael, walked into you office and asked for your help.

You learn that they are a monogamous, gay couple who have been living
together for the past ten years. Both men are successful architects, and after devoting the past decade on their respective careers, they have now decided that they want to marry and raise children together.”

Now pause for a moment, x, and reflect on just how bad the writing in this sample is. Where to even start w it? Consider, the men walked into your office ‘law week’ yet ‘you learn’ is present tense. So you didn’t learn ‘law wk’; you somehow, miraculously, learn in real time what was said to you ‘law week’. [The term for it is ‘tense-shifting’, and it’s an embarrassingly basic mistake. He should have learned better, if he needed to, in his first yr at Occidental.]

Next consider the painful wordiness/clumsiness of the phrasing. Cd you use more words to describe the same scenario? Maybe, but it wd take a Herculean effort. Cd you use less? W the greatest of ease, and w even greater effectiveness.

There’s more, much more, but face it, the above writing is the product of a literarily dysfunctional mind. The person who wrote it has no conception of even the most basic principles of good writing. Indeed, you might even say he has a ‘gift’ for wretched writing, since writing this bad doesn’t come easy. [And please, spare me the pathetic line that it’s just slapdash writing for a legal exam. Writers write. They write when they do prose, memoir, correspondence or simple notes. I’ve read examples of ‘slapdash’ writing by some literary greats. It’s a wonderful, amazing experience. You hear their voice—the same one that made them famous, won prizes, etc.—even in the briefest notes. They write well b/c they write well. It’s part of who they are. Just as Astaire wasn’t graceful and coordinated on stage and a klutz when walking down the street, so writers don’t turn it on and off. Good writers write well, period.]

One thing we can say for sure. The writer of ‘law week’ is not the author of Dreams. The writing in the one cd not be more different than the writing in the other. The writer of Dreams knew what he was doing [even if you don’t like his style, which I don’t]; he used the English language to tell an effective tale [at least for the intended audience] and won accolades for the effort. The writer of ‘law week’ skirmished w the English language and lost...badly.

Ok, granted the today’s education is not what is once was. I’ll narrow my supposition: How many Columbia College of Columbia University graduates from the class of 1983 would make that mistake 30 years further into experience and reading and conversing and listening in the world? How many of the political science majors would make that mistake? This is the elite graduating class that Obama claims is his.
how many congressmen would make that mistake? How many graduate of Harvard Law School would make that mistake?

His propaganda claque claimed that he is the smartest of the smart. For some reason still not fully revealed, Percy Sutton felt he needed to say that Obama was the smartest of the smart or was prevailed upon to make that claim. The smartest of the smart would be proud to show their high school, college and graduate school grades.

The smartest of the smart adult and even the not so smart adult would not make that pronunciation mistake unless they were completely divorced from the ins and outs of U.S. culture, institutions, and divorced from any reading about or passing contact with people in military service and divorced from knowledge of the workings of the U.S. military. And this guy is given the solemn oath of swearing to uphold the U.S. Constitution and of being the commander in chief of something he not only does not understand, but knows before he starts that he wants to bring to its knees through cuts in personnel levels and homosexuals serving openly (no joke intended).

How many Columbia College of Columbia University graduates from the class of 1983 would make that mistake

How many graduates of Columbia or Harvard cannot spell Syracuse.

My theory is that yes, he’s ignorant enough not to know how to pronounce corpsmen. However, I read somewhere [I don’t have the p bookmarked, so I can’t say where it was] that he typically rehearses his remarks in front of a sm group of close advisors. This is standard practice in speechmaking. The speaker needs input on various points, and especially in this case needs practice w the teleprompter.

Anyway, he most likely rehearsed his remarks before a trusted audience. I’m guessing he said corpsemen and was corrected. Malignant Narcissists don’t like to be corrected.

He probably went on to use the mispronunciation in the speech for two purposes. One, it told the person who corrected him that he knew the right pronunciation and was going w the one he wanted regardless. Kind of an in-your-face backhand, if you see what I mean.

At the same time, military-hater that he is, he got to insult the elites to their face. From their POV, he was either saying, ‘I don’t care enough about you to pronounce your branch of service correctly,’ or ‘I’m calling you murderers to your faces—you are men who do nothing more than make corpses’. Either way, an insult.

Win-win for a person as sick as Obama. Make no mistake, Malignant Narcissists are very sick ppl. It’s unbelievable that the US has come to this, that we have one as a POTUS.

Your theory rings true. Maybe he/his advisors also felt that the mispronunciation also made him seem more like the an “outsider,” more like the “underserved,” more like someone with only a basic reading level, more like the kind of people he was pretending to serve. The one thing the image too the chance of excluding was anyone who had served or had had family in the military.

That’s a good reading of the situation. Obama knows he’s not popular with those who serve, have served or have family serving. Alienating them still further costs him little or nothing. Plus he really is petty and childish enough to enjoy giving insult to those he dislikes. The middle-finger he gave to Hillary on one occasion, and to others [look up ‘Obama gives middle finger’ in images—he does it quite a bit] is juvenile beyond belief. The same person who engages in this infantile behavior wd certainly mispronounce corps if he thought it wd serve his purpose. It’s repulsive.

Okay. Most of what I'd seen compared Dreams to the "Breaking the War Mentality" article written by Obama at Columbia, and my assumption was that over time people do learn to write better than they did as college juniors. Maybe they don't. Or maybe Obama never did.

My second assumption is that when people say something that isn't strictly true, they usually have some partial truth to rely on. So a politician who claims that he wrote all his own books may at least have hacked out a rough draft for others to work over and polish into grammatical English.

There's some subjectivity involved. One person's rough draft or first draft may be another person's rough notes. I don't doubt that ghost writers and heavy editing were involved. My hunch is that there was some kind of rough manuscript -- or a dictated version -- for Obama to base his claim of authorship on.

Maybe I'm wrong about that. Maybe it's the other way around. If you decide to lie, maybe you convince yourself that there's a half-truth in there somewhere. If Obama wanted to claim authorship, maybe he just convinced himself that his contribution was more than what it actually was.

I'm not sure that Andersen really knows much more than anyone else, though. He's putting two and two together -- Obama being friends with Ayers, Ayers being a better writer than Obama, Ayers supposedly helping his friends with their writing -- and concluding that Ayers was the ghost writer. I'm not wholly convinced that Anderson has the evidence or that he actually knows who wrote the book.

In any case, I have found references online to a "trunkload" of notes. That may be true and may have made it into the book, but when it gets magnified to a "truckload" of notes, you can see where I might be skeptical.

A trunk-load of notes is quite a few. I’m really not seeing the big issue here.

You are seeing what you want to see. For some reason you want to see Obama as capable of writing a rough draft. This is a personal sentiment on your part. So you read it into a situation where there is no indication that it’s the case. Nothing anyone can say to you, if you are determined to give Obama more credit than the evidence warrants, will change that. It’s an irrational position, and facts cannot counter irrationality.

I’ll just add that Obama doesn’t lie like ordinary, garden variety liars. He lies like a mentally ill man. Look at his Benghazi lies. There is no kernel of truth in them. They are wholesale, unvarnished, sociopathic lies. That is the way he lies all the time. It doesn’t emanate from fudging the truth, it derives from his mental illness. He lives in a separate reality where he really is one of the three best POTUSs that ever occupied the office. He really believes he is the smartest person in the room. [Look it up; there is an exact quote from his lips to this effect.] He honestly believes he’s in a league of his own. His lies proceed from this monstrously mistaken fantasy, and bear no resemblance to reality.

Mental illness is not a pretty sight. We can pity Obama, but we really need to stop propping him up and enabling him. There is zero actual evidence that he wrote anything connected w Dreams. Zero. If your desire to believe otherwise trumps the facts, be happy w the fantasy you have chosen.

Do you have a copy of Dreams? If so, would you be willing to do me a favor?