Because today he interviewed journalist Christopher Andersen (who, like him, writes celebrity biographies) on The Mancow Show and Andersen announced that "he had two separate sources 'within Hyde Park' [who claim William Ayers wrote Dreams From My Father] but, understandably, would not elaborate." Two anonymous sources from, as they say, the neighborhood is the tipping point for me: when combined with the credibility Andersen has earned by dint of a "highly successful career as a celebrity journalist" and the evidence gathered during Cashill's "textual sleuthing," no intellectually honest person could doubt that there's a there in there. How could there not be? Andersen "interviewed some 200 people for the book," which is a whole lot. Here is a list of them drawn from the back matter and organized by chapters:
Chapters 1 and 2
- Janet Allison
- Maxine Box
- Clive Gray
- Joyce Feuer
- Leslie Hairston
- Lowell Jacobs
- Keith Kakugawa
- Eric Kusunoki
- Julie Lauster
- Alan Lum
- Chris McLachlin
- Abner Mikva
- Newton Minow
- Toni Preckwinkle
- Vinai Thummalapally
- Carolyn Trani
- Pake Zane
Chapters 3 and 4
- Loretta Augustin-Herron
- Bradford Berenson
- Cheryl Johnson
- Hazel Johnson
- Jerry Kellman
- Mike Kruglik
- Yvonne Lloyd
- Alvin Love
- Abner Mikva*
- Judson Miner
- Newton Minow*
- Linda Randle
- Vinai Thummalapally*
- Laurence Tribe
Chapters 5 to 8
- Janet Allison*
- Letitia Baldrige
- Mary Ann Campbell
- Joyce Feuer*
- Leslie Hairston*
- Tom Harkin
- Coralee Jacobs
- Denny Jacobs
- Lowell Jacobs
- Mike Jacobs
- John Kerry
- Edward Koch
- Rick Lazio
- Alan Love*
- Abner Mikva*
- Judson Miner*
- Newton Minow*
- Jeremiah Posedel
- Toni Preckwinkle*
- Betsy Vandercook
- Larry Walsh
- Wellington Wilson
- Zarif
If you subtract the sources I asterisked because they were counted in previous chapters, the final tally of Andersen's 200 some interviews is an impressive 43. That means that only 157 or so of them were unwilling to speak truth to the powerful lies of the President on the record. That so few of them were willing to follow the example of the young Obama's "roommate and closest friend . . . Siddiqi" and speak on the—hold on a minute. Does anyone see Siddiqi's name among those listed as interviewees? No?
Must be Andersen toeing the ethical line again and passing off information from someone else's published work as original research. No big deal: Siddiqi told someone that he had no memory of Obama having had a "year-long relationship with a rich, green-eyed lovely" who, as Cashill corroborated via independent textual sleuthing, was actually Ayers's former flame, Diana Oughton. The credibility of Siddiqi's memories is further enhanced by the fact that when he lived with Obama, he spent the majority of his time snorting cocaine, smoking marijuana, and perfecting his Cheech impersonation. Who wouldn't believe his memory of that period is infallible?
Cashill anticipates that the critics who balk at the "lack of attribution by Andersen" or believe that "the citation of [Cashill] as a source and/or a reliance upon [him] as a source" constitutes a demonstration of intellectual unseriousness. Neither of those positions (both of which I have taken) "imply," as Cashill claims, "that Andersen is a fraud and a liar and that he contrived the story he told" because I'm not implying anything.
The sloppiness of Andersen's research demonstrably proves that he's not the sort of celebrity biographer an intelligent person trusts with anonymous sources. Andersen's inability to recognize the worthlessness of Cashill's impressionistic "textual sleuthing" demonstrably proves that he's not the sort of celebrity biographer an intelligent person trusts to do responsible literary analysis. Need I remind you of the "quality" of Cashill's work?
The A-level match
Cashill:
What Mr. Midwest noticed recently is that both Ayers in [A Kind and Just Parent] and Obama in [Dreams From My Father] make reference to the poet Carl Sandburg. In itself, this is not a grand revelation. Let us call it a C-level match. Obama and Ayers seem to have shared the same library in any case . . . Ayers and Obama, however, go beyond citing Sandburg. Each quotes the opening line of his poem "Chicago" . . . This I would call a B-level match. What raises it up a notch to an A-level match is the fact that both misquote "Chicago," and they do so in exactly the same way.
Reality:
Both Ayers and Obama misquote the opening line of Carl Sandburg's "Chicago," substituting "hog butcher to the world" for "hog butcher for the world." This mutual error would be significant (an "A-level match") if Ayers and Obama were the only two people who ever made it, but according to Google Book Search—a secret search engine to which only I have access—the same mistake has been made by Nelson Algren, Alan Lomax, Andrei Codrescu, H.L. Mencken, Paul Krugman, Perry Miller, Donald Hall, Ed McBain, Saul Bellow, S.J. Perelman, Nathanaël West, Ezra Pound, Wright Morris, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes, and the 1967 Illinois Commission on Automation and Technological Progress. (To name but a few.) According to Cashill, I have now proven that Dreams From My Father was written by many a dead man of American letters, a living mystery writer, a New York Times columnist and the 1967 Illinois Commission on Automation and Technological Progress. That bears repeating: I have an "A-level match" that proves that Obama's autobiography was written by a "study of the economic and social effects of automation and other technological changes on industry, commerce, agriculture, education, manpower, and society in Illinois" when Obama was only six years old.
The "baleful" affair
Cashill:
Returning to the exotic, in his Indonesian backyard Obama discovered two "birds of paradise" running wild as well as chickens, ducks, and a "yellow dog with a baleful howl." In [Ayers'] Fugitive Days, there is even more "howling" than there is in Dreams . . . In [A Kind and Just Parent], he talks specifically about a "yellow dog." And he uses the word "baleful" to describe an "eye" in Fugitive Days. For the record, "baleful" means "threatening harm." I had to look it up.
Reality:
Cashill cited as "A-level" evidence the fact that Ayers and Obama used a word he didn't know, despite his being the Executive Editor of Kansas City’s premier business publication, Ingram’s Magazine; despite his having written for Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The Weekly Standard; despite his having authored five books of non-fiction; and despite the word "baleful" having appeared in print 342 times in the past six months alone. Granted, all those appearances were in high-minded literary publications like Newsday ("[w]ith his baleful countenance, wild hair, sonorous baritone and sage pronouncements") or leftist rags like The Washington Times ("warn them in baleful tones if they've forgotten, say, the Constitution"), so it would be unreasonable to expect Cashill to have been familiar with the word . . . or would be, were it not for the fact that it also appears 19 times in the pages of the American Thinker, the publication for which Cashill penned this tripe. (Seems he can begin his careful literary analysis of the other 848,000 potential ghost writers closer to home.)
Lawyers and legal jargon
Cashill:
To this point, I have just skimmed the 759 items in the bill of particulars in my case against Obama's literary genius. Not familiar with the term "bill of particulars?" Uncertain myself, I looked that one up too. It means a list of written statements made by a party to a court proceeding. Ayers and Obama each refer knowingly to a "bill of particulars." Doesn't everyone?
The answer, of course, is no.
Reality:
The phrase "bill of particulars" is an uncommon construction, and its repeated use indicates that the speaker has a specialized vocabulary in which this construction regularly appears. According to LexisNexis, this is exactly the case: in the past six months, that exact phrase has been written 509 times and every single one of them looks like this:
The only people who regularly use the phrase "bill of particulars," then, are lawyers[.]United States v. Clark, NO. 05-6507, UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT, 09a0422n.06;, 2009 U.S. App. LEXIS 12940; 2009 FED App. 0422N (6th Cir.), June 15, 2009, Filed, NOT RECOMMENDED FOR FULL-TEXT PUBLICATION. SIXTH CIRCUIT RULE 28(g) LIMITS CITATION TO SPECIFIC SITUATIONS. PLEASE SEE RULE 28(g) BEFORE CITING IN A PROCEEDING IN A COURT IN THE SIXTH CIRCUIT. IF CITED, A COPY MUST BE SERVED ON OTHER PARTIES AND THE COURT. THIS NOTICE IS TO BE PROMINENTLY DISPLAYED IF THIS DECISION IS REPRODUCED.
Self-evidently hilarious examples of "textual sleuthing"
- Common words are common: "Another note of interest is that all of the distinctive words in the last sentence above—'master,' 'beast,' 'grim,' 'unapologetic,' and 'deed,' as well as the phrase 'hunkered down'—appear in Fugitive Days."
- The sea is a pregnant metaphor: "Ayers and Obama both use words that relate to the sea ('fog, mist, ships, seas, boats, oceans, calms, captains, charts, first mates, storms, streams, wind, waves, anchors, barges, horizons, ports, panoramas, moorings, tides, currents, and things howling, fluttering, knotted, ragged, tangled, and murky')."
- People are lonely: "After the neighbor's death, the police let themselves into the old man’s apartment, and for no good reason Obama finds himself in the apartment. 'The loneliness of the scene affected me,' he writes. Loneliness as a theme courses through Fugitive Days as well."
- Old men are stooped and people wear hats: "In the opening pages, Obama makes an exception to his New York solitude for an elderly neighbor, a "stooped" gentleman who wore a 'fedora.' In Fugitive Days, it was Ayers’ grandfather who was "stooped" and a helpful stranger who wore a 'fedora.'"
- Some people are quiet: "Obama tells the reader that the neighbor’s 'silence' impressed him. 'Silence' impressed Ayers as well. There are at least ten references to the word in Fugitive Days."
- Angry people feel rage: "[B]oth Ayers and Obama speak of 'rage' the way that Eskimos do of snow—in
so many varieties, so often, that they feel the need to qualify it,
here as 'impressive rage,' elsewhere in Dreams as 'suppressed rage' or 'coil of rage,' and in Fugitive Days as 'justifiable rage,' 'uncontrollable rage,' 'blind rage,' and, of course, 'Days of Rage.'"
The Kicker
Cashill tells us he wouldn't believe himself either: "I have as much faith in the hypothesis that follows as . . . biologists do in evolution, so bear with me please as I, like they, present my evidence in the indicative." He has as much "faith" in his hypothesis as biologists do in the hypothesis of evolution. I wonder what Intelligence Design advocate Jack Cashill has to say about that kind of faith?
ID partisans across the board believe in micro-evolution: that is, evolution within a species. Some believe in evolution between species, macro-evolution, if guided.
What the ID movement challenges is Darwinian mechanics, random variation and natural selection, an elegant idea in 1859 but in 1999 still just an idea. Neo-Darwinians have as much trouble explaining how complex organs like a wing or an eye—or even a single cell within an eye—could be the result of unguided, incremental change as Darwin did.
Darwin could only hope that the fossil record would one day prove him right. It hasn't. No evidence has surfaced of a transformation from one species to the next. Nor has anyone offered a satisfactory explanation for the rash of new animal life that inexplicably entered the fossil record during the so-called Cambrian explosion.
I am not about to dignify that creationist nonsense by responding to it. If Cashill really wants to know what use half a wing might be to a flightless bird, he can go ask a penguin.
Conclusion
When I first wrote that anyone who uses "Cashill's juvenile musings as a hypothetical which, if true, suggests all the unsavory things [they] already believe about Obama," I didn't know that Cashill also bought into Intelligent Design, but it makes sense that someone who could compile and be convinced by the evidence above would be a subject of King Tendentiousness himself. Like ID, Cashill's theory consists of details inexpertly cobbled together by deeply interested parties. The similar caveat applies in both: should it turn out that one day the Great Designer reveals Himself or Obama admits that Ayers helped edit his memoir, the soundness of their respective methodologies would not be validated—all that will be proven is that sometimes tendentious idiots get lucky.
UPDATE. Not surprisingly, those who desperately want the story to be true believe that the two anonymous sources validate Cashill's initial findings:
My wonder is, will these condescending literary "experts" continue to hide behind their strained pedantic incredulity, or are they willing to revisit this story now that additional information is available to them—information that suggests that those of us who kept an open mind . . . were far less doctrinaire in our arguments than those who, in their rush to condemn us as knee-jerk political reactionaries, were themselves guilty of having prematurely ruling the possible "absurd"?
And when the Great Designer parks His Flying Saucer and reveals His Plan, I will eat crow. Until that day, I will continue to insist that The X-Files was a fiction no matter how many sources, anonymous or otherwise, report having been abducted and probed.
(x-posted.)
Surely it's a sound bet that Letitia Baldrige, Rick Lazio, Ed Koch, and John Kerry were all knowledgeable sources who assured Andersen that Bill Ayers had written Dreams From My Father?
Dreams From My Father, incidentally, is a remarkably good book -- which bears absolutely no personal touches from Barack Obama -- considered from any angle, and which I highly recommend everyone read, and would do so if the author were, well, anybody: kudos to Bill Ayers for his mad writing skilz! I can't imagine why Ayers hasn't had any other best-sellers.
Oh, wait.
And, not incidentally, one of the many reasons I feel no hesitation in calling Cashhill an idiot is that he had to look up what "baleful" means; it's not exactly a high-falutin', obscure, word.
You hit the rest of the points that led to my conclusive analysis of Cashhill's text. The man has tools of analysis like that of no other. His articles fill a much-needed gap in the literature.
Posted by: Gary Farber | Wednesday, 30 September 2009 at 02:48 PM
When you were doing searches, did you look for instances where Cashill had used 'baleful'? because I find it hard to believe he really didn't know that word until Obama taught it to him.
And now I'm off to look up 'tendentious' and hopefully prove you're an eighteenth-century Englishwoman.
Posted by: Endy | Wednesday, 30 September 2009 at 04:05 PM
Wm T Sherman? Other Cashill apologists? "Is anybody going to deal with it, or are you all just going to wait for it to go away?"
Posted by: tomemos | Wednesday, 30 September 2009 at 04:31 PM
As per the update, tomemos, they're too busy running victory laps, if you can believe it.
Posted by: SEK | Wednesday, 30 September 2009 at 05:33 PM
Endy:
When you were doing searches, did you look for instances where Cashill had used 'baleful'?
No dice . . . meaning he did not, in fact, know from "baleful" despite being all this:
The bar to being all that must be very, very low.
Posted by: SEK | Wednesday, 30 September 2009 at 05:37 PM
The Mancow Show link don't go nowheres.
I still think it's overwhelmingly likely that the little president man had help writing his book. That's ok. Writing a book is hard. Writing an article for that little Harvard legal magazine what he was editor of is hard, so he never did get around to writing one. But if it wasn't Ayers what helped him, who did? And don't say M'chelle cause... please. Woman struggles to fill a fruit bowl with fruit. Asking her to fill a page with words would make her head asplode I think.
Posted by: happyfeet | Wednesday, 30 September 2009 at 06:57 PM
Writing an article for that little Harvard legal magazine what he was editor of is hard
...not to mention expressly prohibited by every journal I've come across. The managing editor isn't allowed to include his or her own work because they're in a position to taint the blind review process: even if they don't have the final decision on their article, they've talked to the other editors about their own work and it would be recognized fairly quickly.
But if it wasn't Ayers what helped him, who did?
apples to oranges it was his editor at Three Rivers Press, the same way editors like Gordon Lish helped turn Raymond Carver into Raymond Carver. That's what Mr. Occam tells me---well, that and that the most likely reason for the stylistic difference between Dreams and Audacity has something to do with Three Rivers being merged into Crown and him working with a different editor. All memoirs are edited, I'm not arguing otherwise. The crazy element here is the belief that, of all the people in all the world, it's Bill Ayers who edited Dreams.
Contrary to what Jeff et al would have you believe, the only evidence of Ayers's involvement comes from the two anonymous sources---because Cashill's analysis, as I think I've sufficiently demonstrated, is easily falsifiable junk, a random collocation of common words and streets scenes made meaningful by someone with a mind predisposed to doing that. Hence, his defense of ID, which plays fast and loose with facts in this exact same manner.
Posted by: SEK | Wednesday, 30 September 2009 at 07:21 PM
I'll respect your opinion of Cashill's analysis of Dreams! because that is your profession. But despite all of your "search hits" for some of the phrase usages he cites, you ignore the cumulative nature of all of these likeness occurring, individually dismissing them out of hand a priori. I doubt that all of the authors your searches returned used every one of the phrase combinations that Obama and Ayers appear to share usage of; regardless of how trivial or asinine you feel that they are.
And I don't understand using any particular religious belief of Cashill's as proof of his inanity. While his ignorance of the meaning of "baleful" is valid to criticize, one writer to another, outside of the circles you interact in, where many similar beliefs are held, a person's personal religious beliefs are far from a convincing indictment of either authorial legitiamcy, intellectual savvy or even sanity.
I understand that you may not agree with Cashill or Andersen, and may have a professional skepticism based on what you believe are shoddy techniques. That's a professional opinion. But basing, in part, your disbelief on the fact that you disagree with other works they've successfully published, views thay have professed, or religious beliefs may make for amusing snark but is not firm footing for a refutation of their theses.
And forgive me for making assumptions, but I get the impression that you would not have questioned the veracity of Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, or their "Watergate" expose, a piece run largely based on information supplied by an anonymous source, "Deep Throat", whose identity was not revealed until much later; regardless of either writers lack of credential, professional accomplishment, or journalistic bona fides at that time. Perhaps that's because Nixon was not as sympathetic a character to you then as Obama is today, something only you know.
Me? I'm classically disinterested in this matter one way or another. Mr. Obama is already the President, and support for him will not turn on this matter alone. If false or lost to the "memory hole", then no big deal, and as I said if it gains traction, it alone will not do signifigant damage. The only way it could hurt him if true would be to expose a basic veracity problem that some in this nation feel he is developing a reputation for.
I don't think that you are as disinterested frankly, both for personal as well as ideological reasons. While the tone in this essay is entertaining in places, and some of your arguments thought provoking, keep in mind that you are no more right than others who hold the opposing point of view. Unlike more technical disciplines, this is a subjective analysis; especially since you have no direct communication with either writer.
Posted by: Bob Reed | Wednesday, 30 September 2009 at 07:34 PM
Beginning at the end:
especially since you have no direct communication with either writer
That's their fault, not mine. I've made every effort to contact both.
keep in mind that you are no more right than others who hold the opposing point of view
That's the thing, though: I actually am. Using Cashill's own standars, I could demonstrate that Shakespeare wrote 90 percent of Romantic Poetry because there's nothing unique about the working vocabulary of post-Shakespearean poets---they all borrowed heavily from the Bard, so a simple tabulation of common occurances would almost always result in a false positive.
Moreover, stylistic similarity is not, in and of itself, proof of authorship. How do you prove one person wrote two books based on style alone? You begin by praying that person is not James Joyce, because you could maybe prove that the man who wrote Dubliners also wrote Stephen Hero, and that the man who wrote Portrait wrote the first three chapters of Ulysses, but it would be extremely difficult to prove that the same man wrote each of the subsequent chapters, much less the Wake.
Grant that the hypothetical author is not a similar linguistic virtuoso, and the first element that needs to be eliminated are the predominant features of a the genre in which the books are written. For example: the fact that two mystery novels both prominently feature private investigators, blondes with legs up to here, and tense conversations that lead to violence proves nothing about whether a particular author wrote a particular pair of mysteries. In the same vein, the fluidity of identity and the instability of memory are generic features of memoirs for the obvious reason that the author is slowly reevaluating his or her life.
When we say that we hardly recognize the person we were as a teenager, we are discussing the fluidity of identity; and were we writing a memoir, we would be muttering something to that effect every two minutes. When we fail to remember when it was that we went on that boat trip or baseball game with our father, we are discussing the instability of memory; and were we writing a memoir, we would be consulting friends and family on a regular basis in order to clarify when this or that happened. Maybe they would remember, but maybe they would remember differently, thereby challenging both your own memory of the event and theirs.
Such realizations---and explicit articulations of them---are so common in memoir as a genre that they can't be used as identifying characteristics in the way Cashill uses them. They're not distinctive.
I don't think that you are as disinterested frankly, both for personal as well as ideological reasons.
Close: I'm not disinterested because Cashill's making a mockery of my profession, and it's difficult enough for me to claim that I have standards, and that they're rigorously adhered to, when the kind of vaguely associative work Cashill does becomes "literary criticism" in the common currency.
And I don't understand using any particular religious belief of Cashill's as proof of his inanity.
I didn't say it was Cashill's religious beliefs that make him an untrustworthy carekeeper of fact, but his belief in Intelligent Design. ID is a parody of science: it looks like honest inquiry, but it's not because the conclusion is always foregone. Unlike those who study evolutionary theory, whose conception of what constitutes "evolution" and "natural selection" has been in flux---put to the scientific method---almost since the day Darwin published the Origin. Evolutionary theory adapts to changing facts; ID finds errant facts that will buttress its core belief.
I doubt that all of the authors your searches returned used every one of the phrase combinations that Obama and Ayers appear to share usage of; regardless of how trivial or asinine you feel that they are.
The odds of there being a third book that shares all those terms is very slim---so slim, in fact, that none of Ayers's other books appear either. That has nothing to do with Ayers/Obama and everything to do with the infinite nature of language. The fact that Cashill's "experiment" can't even prove that Ayers is the author of his other books says something about the soundness of his methodology.
Also of note is that Cashill draws his examples from multiple books by Ayers. If you were to hand me four books by F. Scott Fitzgerald, I bet you I can prove he wrote one by Hemingway or, honestly, almost any other 20th Century American writer.
Posted by: SEK | Wednesday, 30 September 2009 at 07:54 PM
I get the impression that you would not have questioned the veracity of Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, or their "Watergate" expose, a piece run largely based on information supplied by an anonymous source
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Aside from the ad hominem speculation, "Deep Throat" was one source: what they reported was confirmed from published sources and cited interviews. He was not anonymous to their editor, who needed Felt's identity to be sure about the validity of the information.
Posted by: Ahistoricality | Wednesday, 30 September 2009 at 08:35 PM
I find it shockingly uncynical that you literary people are so quick to welcome this dimwit little president man into your club. He's no more a literary personage than Hugo Chavez. He doesn't even write his own teleprompter scripts. Y'all are a lot defining authorship down I think, and it makes me sad. You know who's a writer is that John Irving.
Posted by: happyfeet | Wednesday, 30 September 2009 at 08:42 PM
"But if it wasn't Ayers what helped him, who did? And don't say M'chelle cause... please. Woman struggles to fill a fruit bowl with fruit. Asking her to fill a page with words would make her head asplode I think."
When is someone going to call Happyfeet a racist, sexist asshole for repeating this libel over and over? Michelle Obama graduated cum laude from Princeton. Happyfeet has nothing besides his prejudices to stand on in calling her dumb, yet he's done it multiple times here, as far as I know without being called out.
Posted by: tomemos | Wednesday, 30 September 2009 at 09:04 PM
Oh, and as for this:
"He doesn't even write his own teleprompter scripts."
Meet this:
"Obama takes an unusually hands-on approach to his speech writing, more so than most politicians."
But maybe you'd like to go into more depth about how little credit as a speechwriter Obama should get compared to, say, his predecessor.
Posted by: tomemos | Wednesday, 30 September 2009 at 09:08 PM
oh. She's not exactly famous for her intellectual accomplishments. You don't read Us do you? M'chelle mostly spends her time shopping at Target, going to recitals for the two girl children and just living to make her man happy. Sometimes she works out her arms so they are fine and toney. She's not some pretentious super smart person, silly. She's just like you and me!!
Posted by: happyfeet | Wednesday, 30 September 2009 at 09:29 PM
If you read Us Weekly, you might want to reconsider the wisdom of calling a Princeton and Harvard Law grad dumb.
Posted by: tomemos | Wednesday, 30 September 2009 at 09:41 PM
You're so grumpy and judgey. Here is a happy song about love and whatnot. It's for you, Tomemos. So you don't go to bed all grumpy like that.
Posted by: happyfeet | Wednesday, 30 September 2009 at 09:45 PM
AHISTORICALITY,
"Wrong, wrong, wrong. Aside from the ad hominem speculation, "Deep Throat" was one source"
I never said they had any more than one source...
"...what they reported was confirmed from published sources and cited interviews."
Episodes that occurred well after that of the story breaking, as I recall. Seems like the stuff of "cart before the horse"...
"He was not anonymous to their editor, who needed Felt's identity ..."
But the fact remains that that same identity was secret from the public at large who made judgements based on that story as well as the investigators later. So, since the source remained anonymous to just about everyone until his recent death, that's the same as Andersens's sources, who are known but to him...
Posted by: Bob Reed | Wednesday, 30 September 2009 at 10:32 PM
"just about everyone" != "but to him"
At any rate, Bob (who spurns local government by arguing for governing by national polling: incidentally), apart from the undergraduate's whiny "that's just your opinion," you have anything else to say about the Baleful Cashill's magic search database? After you're done with that, perhaps you can join McCash in arguing that Marie de France wrote La vie seinte Audree (see Speculum 77 (2002): 744-77). <- note. Medievalist joke. I won't explain.
as far as I know without being called out.
Oh, I did. I also asked where HF received his terminal degree. No answer, of course.
And HF seems to be confusing the marketing of first ladies with the actual accomplishments of first ladies.
As for "literary types": wtf? Yeah, and my legislators tend to have pretty bad taste in music too. So what?
Posted by: Karl Steel | Thursday, 01 October 2009 at 07:42 AM
you are very surly this morning, Dr. Steel. Please to be telling me what M'chelle has accomplished? Her arms are fine and toney.
Posted by: happyfeet | Thursday, 01 October 2009 at 11:25 AM
"Please to be telling me what M'chelle has accomplished?"
This has been answered already. You gave me a crappy song in response, remember? Troll is getting boring.
Posted by: tomemos | Thursday, 01 October 2009 at 12:34 PM