What will Random House do as this kind of clear evidence accumulates that the sitting president of the United States lied to them and the American people about having written his memoir by himself?… For now the clever “I was joking” story is working fine … except for the timing. Unless someone can show me another “I was joking” incident prior to theHannity incident, I think the evidence leads to Andersen outing Ayers by mistake, and the chain-yanking being a ploy.

In all seriousness, who’ll be the second elected Republican to buy into this kookery? Rep. Chris Cannon (R-Utah) was the first.*

An earlier version of this post referred to Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah), not Rep. Chris Cannon (R-Utah). We regret the error.

- Jonah Goldberg of National Review.

I am not sure what to make of the story that Ayers has now admitted to writing Obama’s autobiography. If it pans out, that is to my mind a very big story. Stay tuned. But I do think I should revise my earlier pooh-poohing of Jack Cashill’s effort to prove the Ayers-Obama connection.

- Vox Day of WorldNetDaily.

I don’t know if Ayers wrote it or not, but I’m entirely confident that Obama didn’t. Very few politicians and public figures write their own books, and Obama is far too much of an empty suit to have written the two that have his name on them.

- Carol Platt Lieblau of Townhall.com.

One has to wonder why no one in the MSM ever thought of simply asking “Professor” Ayers the same question. Will anyone in the MSM bother to follow up?

- Tom Maguire of JustOneMinute.

Something can be the truth even if reduced to a joke… I think the Dreams story is pretty accessible – Ayers is Obama’s ghost-writer.

- James Simpson of The American Thinker and Examiner.com.

Was he, as she had asked, pulling our collective legs? Other sources report rumors that Ayers is very upset both about not getting any credit for helping Obama on ‘Dreams,’ and may also be put off by being summarily thrown under the bus along with Rev. Wright and everyone else who becomes an inconvenience to this President.

- William A. Jacobson of Legal Insurrection.

Will Obama issue a denial of Ayers’ accusation? Will the usually compliant press ask a real question for once? Probably neither, which is too bad.

And finally, sort of, the fantasy-inclined Ann Althouse.

Let’s say he did write it. Well, he’s not really admitting that. He’s making fun of the way some conservative bloggers think they’ve found evidence that he wrote it. He knows most sensible people believe their evidence is bullshit, and this has been amusing to him because he — in this scenario of mine — knows that, actually, they are right.

The last two bloggers are law professors.

Benjy Sarlin talked to Ayers for the definitive response to all this.

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When he finished speaking, we put the authorship question right to him. For a split second, Ayers was nonplussed. Then an Abbie Hoffmanish, steal-this-book-sort-of-smile lit up his face. He gently took National Journal by the arm. “Here’s what I’m going to say. This is my quote. Be sure to write it down: ‘Yes, I wrote Dreams From My Father. I ghostwrote the whole thing. I met with the president three or four times, and then I wrote the entire book.’” He released National Journal’s arm, and beamed in Marxist triumph. “And now I would like the royalties.”

Ayers is messing with conservatives. People he’s duped so far: Jonah Goldberg, his mother Lucianne Goldberg, Tom Maguire, Dennis Byrne, Carol Platt Lieblau, and a bunch of other conservatives, some of whom try to split the difference by suggesting that Ayers is revealing a little bit of truth behind the sarcasm. How embarrassing.

One reason that I suspected Ayers of messing with people? He’s done it to me. In 2001, I met him at a book signing, joined by a few fellow college students who were attempting to nail him on the then-hot controversy of his comments that he wished he’d made more bombs–comments that happened to appear in the 9/11/01 edition of the New York Times. Ayers messed with us, joking back and forth, giving us a map of Afghanistan, and signing my copy of the book with a happy left-wing message.

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I am not sure what to make of the story that Ayers has now admitted to writing Obama’s autobiography. If it pans out, that is to my mind a very big story. Stay tuned. But I do think I should revise my earlier pooh-poohing of Jack Cashill’s effort to prove the Ayers-Obama connection. A while back, a close friend of mine (and a pretty famous person in NR land) harrangued me about how I didn’t give Cashill’s argument enough attention or consideration and that it makes a pretty persuasive case. This friend then walked me through it for a while and I was impressed. I’m still sure what the truth is (sic) but whether this latest story pans out or not, I figured I should at least withdraw some of my, uh, pooh-pooh.

Let’s take a few steps back.

Ayers told the blogger that he acted as Obama’s Cyrano because “Michelle asked me to.” That’s not even what Christopher Andersen suggests in his account of the Ayers story, which is partially sourced to original conspiracy theorist Jack Cashill.

Ayers also told the blogger that if she proved he co-wrote Obama’s book, “we can split the royalties.” If he’s referring to the royalties for the still-selling “Dreams From My Father,” we know that, well, he didn’t get any of those — check Obama’s Senate financial disclosure forms. This sounds a whole lot like a joke.

A reasonable explanation for this, if we take the heretofore-obscure blogger at her word for what Ayers said: Ayers was messing around with a conservative movement that’s been after him for a decade, putting them back on the trail of a fruitless conspiracy theory.

As to who told Goldberg that Cashill made a “persuasive case,” it could be anyone, but the evidence suggests it might have been NRO blogger Andy McCarthy or leftist-turned-conservative author Ronald Radosh, both big believers of Cashill. And I fully expect this story to break into the conservative TV media soon. Yes, it’s truly shocking to think that Ayers, a man who helped wreck the anti-Vietnam War movement by becoming a terrorist, would make such a miscalculation.

I’m trying to come up with a name for adherents of this theory. “Ayersheads”? Does that work?

UPDATE: I’m just seeing that James Simpson of Examiner.com–a conservative news site that pays bloggers for posts–interviewed the conservative blogger, who gave him a more detailed version of the story. Simpson’s convinced.

Was he, as she had asked, pulling our collective legs? Other sources report rumors that Ayers is very upset both about not getting any credit for helping Obama on ‘Dreams,’ and may also be put off by being summarily thrown under the bus along with Rev. Wright and everyone else who becomes an inconvenience to this President.

Well, if “other sources report rumors,” who can argue?

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[U]nprompted he said–I wrote Dreams From My Father. I said, oh, so you admit it. He said–Michelle asked me to. I looked at him. He seemed eager. He’s about my height, short. He went on to say–and if you can prove it, we can split the royalties. So I said, stop pulling my leg. Horrible thought. But he came again–I really wrote it, the wording was similar. I said I believe you probably heavily edited it. He said–I wrote it. I said–why would I believe you, you’re a liar.

He had no answer to that. Just looked at me. Then he turned and walked off, and said again his bit about my proving it and splitting the proceeds.

Convincing! Between the lack of recorded evidence or direct quotes, ruling out the possibility that Ayers would fool around with a blogger who wasn’t actually taping him, this is, indeed, compelling evidence.

If you want to see just how compelling, check the updates to Leary’s post, where she’s been linked by HotAir.com (whose Allahpundit writes it all off as a joke, albeit a traffic-getting one), Lucianne.com (where it’s a must-read) and a bunch of other conservative bloggers, as it also trickles into the comment sections of FoxNews.com.

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There are people who can act holier-than-thou about ghostwriters. Rush Limbaugh is not one of them. His first book, “The Way Things Ought to Be,” was famously written by John Fund of The Wall Street Journal. His second book was ghostwritten by Joseph Farah, who then became editor-in-chief of WorldNetDaily. And to complete the circle, WND has been a main source for Jack Cashill’s numerous articles about the Obama-Ayers book conspiracy.

The Washington Independent’s David Weigel, for instance, is among those who dismiss [Christopher] Andersen’s claim because he credits me as a source… Had he read Andersen’s book, which he does not appear to have, Weigel would have seen that Andersen’s retelling of the story was based not on what I had written but on what Andersen had been told by someone who was on the scene.

Confession: I have read only the Ayers bits of Andersen’s book, and you can find some excerpts of them after the jump. Andersen is a quick turnaround author who makes mistakes, such as referring to Ayers’ wife as “Bernadette Dohrn” — her name is Bernardine. And I’ll reiterate what I last wrote — the evidence Andersen gets from an anonymous source does not back up what Cashill has been saying.

In an interview with Cashill, Andersen claims to have “two sources” for his “Ayers as Obama guru” theory. In the book, he only cites “another Hyde Park neighbor [of Ayers and Obama]” and… Jack Cashill. The neighbor tells Andersen that Obama gave Ayers (in Andersen’s words) “oral histories, along with his partial manuscript and a trunkload of notes,” and says (in the neighbor’s words) that Ayers and Obama were “friends” who “worked on various projects together.”

Cashill puts together the “Ayers as guru” theory for Andersen.

And from there:

That, if true, is interesting and reveals that Obama misrepresented his friendship with Ayers last year. But Cashill’s argument has not been the “informal editing service” argument. It’s been that Ayers wrote “the better part” of “Dreams From My Father,” something not even Andersen suggests. In one of his columns on the subject, Cashill even argues that Ayers either ghost-wrote the epilogue of “The Audacity of Hope,” or helped Obama get into Harvard, or both. First, here’s how Cashill proves the “ghosting.”

Obama talks about our “collective dreams.” Ayers uses the word “collective” the way others use “and” and “the.” The Weather Underground was organized into “collectives.” He refers to “collective well-being,” “collective gloom,” “collective goodwill” and a dozen other Marxist-spawned “collective” sentiments.  Speaking of Marx, Obama uses the concept of “process” in a consciously dialectic sense as does Ayers.

“Both law and politics required compromise,” the man tells him, adding that he himself had thought about going into politics but was unwilling to compromise.  Historically, the real life Ayers has sounded much like Obama’s academic sage. In “Fugitive Days,” for instance, he tells us that he and his comrades were eager to “combat the culture of compromise.”

The punchline? Andersen, who has written dozens of tabloid-style books, cites someone else for the Ayers research. He cites Jack Cashill.

According to Cashill, Andersen’s contribution to the Ayers storyline is the recollection of “a Hyde Park neighbor” who claims that Obama, struggling with the book, gave “oral histories, along with a partial manuscript and a truckload of notes” to Ayers and asked for advice. Any author or anyone who knows an author is probably chuckling at this point — passing unfinished portions to colleagues with some time and experience is pretty standard.

If you take Andersen on his word, it’s true that this anecdote portrays Ayers and Obama as closer friends than they let on during the campaign. But it’s a big leap from there to Cashill’s characterization of “the Obama-as-Milli Vanilli story.” Indeed, Andersen doesn’t even report that story out. He writes that “Ayers’ contribution to Barack’s ‘Dreams From My Father’ would be significant – so much so that the book’s language, oddly specific references, literary devices and themes would bear a jarring similarity to Ayers’s own writing.” For that analysis he cites Cashill, whose previous analyses of “Dreams” been along these lines:

[W]hen the young Obama pontificates about “angry young men in Soweto or Detroit or the Mekong Delta,” one hears the voice of someone much edgier and more aware than Obama. This reference reflects Ayers’ worldview of America as a “marauding monster,” one that terrorizes its own citizens of color just as it does those in the Third World.

Ayers does not define himself as being part of this monster but rather sees himself and his colleagues as saboteurs “behind enemy lines.”

Curiously, Obama used the exact same phrase – “behind enemy lines” – to describe his own status while working in corporate America.

I think it’s telling that when asked to expand on this in an interview with Sean Hannity, Andersen moved on. The most potentially explosive section of his book and he doesn’t want to talk about it? Would he do that if his research consisted of more than citing the obsessive Cashill?

I’ve read both “Dreams From My Father” and Ayers’s memoir “Fugitive Days,” which was published six years after “Dreams.” Ayers’s book is worse. He uses a William Faulkner trope and eschews quotation marks; Obama liberally reconstructs conversations with friends, even creating some composite characters to speak with. And Ayers’s book is stuffed with howlers like “The Fourth of July bombs were all good bombs, except sometimes” and “I felt now at the epicenter of a resistance so wide and so deep that it would quickly disrupt the cotton wool of consciousness afflicting the country.” The irony of the Ayers conspiracy is that Obama is a better writer than Ayers, whose pretentiousness oozes off the pages.

Cashill’s column on the whole mess basically argues that the Ayers theory should wreck Obama’s credibility, because “the left has been at pains to depict Republicans – George Bush and Sarah Palin most recently – as dunces because they were unable to write their own books.” Of course, Obama wrote a second book, “The Audacity of Hope,” 10 years after “Dreams,” and so far no literary analysts have tried to prove it was ghosted by Jeremiah Wright. So it’s really not clear to me what this conspiracy theory is supposed to prove. Might Ayers have programmed Obama by making suggestive references to the Mekong Delta in the den of a Hyde Park mansion 14 years ago? I’ll quote David Freddoso, the author of the bestselling “The Case Against Barack Obama,” whom I asked about this theory.

Cashill’s stuff on this was a lot of crap, all conjecture and no concrete evidence.

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Then she nails her culprit: Bill Ayers.

Obama served with Weather Underground terrorist and neighbor Bill Ayers on the Chicago Annenberg Challenge education initiative. Downplaying academic achievement in favor of left-wing radical activism in the public schools is rooted in Ayers’ pedagogical philosophy. Obama served as the program’s first chairman of the board, while Ayers steered its curricular policy. The two oversaw grants to welfare rights enterprise ACORN and to avowed communist Michael Klonsky — a close pal of Ayers and member of the militant Students for a Democratic Society. SDS served as a precursor to the violent Weather Underground organization.

As investigative journalist Stanley Kurtz reported, Klonsky and Ayers teamed up on the so-called “small schools movement” to steer schoolchildren away from core academics to left-wing politicking on issues of “inequity, war and violence.”

A cadre of like-minded educators and national service administrators across the country share the same core commitment to transforming themselves from imparters of knowledge to transformers of society. The “change” agenda trains students to think only about what they should do for Obama — and rarely to contemplate how his powers and ambitions should be limited and restrained.

The smoking gun? A 2006 speech by Ayers in Caracas, a secret so deep that it’s, err, posted on Ayers’ Website. While the White House’s clumsy rollout of the speech (its original questions for students, about how they could “help the president”) sparked the controversy, this is what’s fueling it.

While Sotomayor thus apparently supported terrorism, the ad warns that she also “Wants to Take Away Your Guns.”  Which would, of course, leave you defenseless against those Puerto Rican terrorists.