Here's how desperate they're getting

We know that McCain and his assorted troglodyte supporters have gotten desperate in recent weeks. Virtually 100% of McCain's advertising buys are for attack ads (has anyone seen a McCain ad that wasn't an attack?), every poll is against them, and nothing they do seems to work. But they've been told that the attacks work, and they know they worked when Bush used them against McCain, so that's all they have left, and that's what they're doing.

Here is a particularly absurd example of that very tactic, from an outstanding example of the right-wing troglodyte class. Jack Cashill writes for WorldNutDaily and has, among other things, published books about how the Clintons killed Ron Brown, how TWA Flight 800 was shot down by the Navy and covered up, and how intellectuals are destroying the United States. Who better to get out the real truth about Barack Obama?

In Cashill's fevered imagination we now see a Grand Unified Field Theory of Barack Obama. Not only is he an intellectual, not only is he a protege of Weather Underground founder Bill Ayers, but Bill Ayers wrote his book.

I kid you not. Cashill has strung together a pastiche of questionable methodology; unremarkable parallels, like the fact that both Obama and Ayers use words like "ship", "storm", and "horizon" as metaphors, or the fact that both Obama's and Ayers's memoirs include minor chronological errors; and finds that these facts all lead inexorably to one conclusion: Barack Obama could not possibly have written his memoir, so it must have been written by Bill Ayers.

And you'll like this part. Here is what Cashill identifies as the single most persuasive piece of evidence tying the Obama memoir to Ayers:

If there is any one paragraph in Dreams that has convinced me of Ayers' involvement it is this one, in which Obama describes the Black Nationalist message:

"A steady attack on the white race... served as the ballast that could prevent the ideas of personal and communal responsibility from tipping into an ocean of despair."

As a writer, especially in the pre-Google era of Dreams, I would never have used a metaphor as specific as "ballast" unless I knew exactly what I was talking about. Seaman Ayers most surely did.

Get it? At the time this was written, Obama was nothing but a thirty-four year old graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, so he couldn't possibly have know what ballast is. But you know who did? Seaman Bill Ayers!

If that's not a smoking gun, I don't know what is. Gotcha, Obama! Might as well resign right now, Jack Cashill has you dead to rights.

It's only fair to point out that this clown went to my high school, as did Pat Fitzgerald. I'd be curious about what the Jesuits who taught me would say about this ridiculous display.