The Bill Ayers Conspiracy Rolls On

By David Weigel
10/19/09

Thomas Lipscomb [senior fellow at the Annenberg Center for the Digital Future], a fairly prominent conservative investigative journalist last seen defending the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth against charges of dishonesty, dives head-first into the “Bill Ayers wrote Obama’s first memoir” conspiracy theory. The crux of his argument is that Ayers, by exasperatedly joking to blogger Ann Leary that he wrote the book, may have been trying to pass a secret message to the media, because Christopher Andersen appeared on Sean Hannity’s show to discuss the conspiracy theory (he actually said that Ayers and Obama were part of a “literary cabal,” not that Ayers wrote the book).

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.*

http://washingtonindependent.com/64260/the-ayers-conspiracy-rolls-on