Report: Newly Found Article Confirms Obama Did Not Author "Dreams of My Father"

The latest from Jack Cashill:

The belief that moribund institutions, rather than individuals are at the root of the problem, keep SAM's energies alive.

– Barack Obama, "Breaking The War Mentality"

The highly indicative sentence above comes from an 1,800-word article Barack Obama wrote for Columbia's weekly news magazine, Sundial, at the height of the KGB-generated anti-nuke craze in March 1983. Obama was 21 at the time.

The sentence nicely captures Obama's skill as a writer. The noun, "belief," and the verb, "keep," don't agree – one of an appalling five such noun-verb mismatches in the essay – and the punctuation is fully random.

More problematically, the word choice sucks all logic out of the sentence. In the previous paragraph, Obama had warned his readers about the "the relentless, often silent spread of militarism in the country."

In this paragraph, the reader is told that these same military institutions are "moribund"–that is "nearly dead." How their debilitated state keeps the "energies" of the Students Against Militarism (SAM) "alive" is apparently left to the reader's imagination.

This essay, posted two days ago by Ben Smith on his Politico blog, represents the single best example of Obama's native writing skills yet unearthed.

It should put an end to the charade that Barack Obama wrote his 1995 memoir "Dreams From My Father" unaided, but it probably won't. The literary left has committed itself to Obama's genius.

In "Breaking The War Mentality," every sentence clunks. Obama not only makes scores of basic grammatical errors – these, with practice, he might have learned to correct – but he also fails to turn one lively or concise or even interesting phrase in the entire essay. Here are some samples:

"An entirely student-run organization, SAM casts a wider net than ARA, though for the purposes of effectiveness, they have tried to lock in on one issue at a time."

"At this time, the current major issue is the Solomon Bill, the latest legislation from Congress to obtain compliance to registration."

"Perhaps the essential goodness of humanity is an arguable proposition, but by observing the SAM meeting last Thursday night, with its solid turnout and enthusiasm, one might be persuaded that the manifestations of our better instincts can at least match the bad ones."

We are asked to believe that in just a decade, without any additional training, Obama was able to write sentences like the following from "Dreams":

"Winter came and the city turned monochrome-black trees against gray sky above white earth. Night now fell in midafternoon, especially when the snowstorms rolled in, boundless prairie storms that set the sky close to the ground, the city lights reflected against the clouds."

Please! To put Obama's talents in perspective, imagine him as a golfer. "Breaking The War Mentality" nets him about a 105 on an easy public course.