Yes, it’s true… Fact IS weirder than fiction. This is all starting to look like a low budget movie that nobody would ever pay good money to see.

Raw Story The brother of a Republican congressman and a Republican businessman attempted to pay an professor in Oxford to use software he designed to “prove” that 1960s radical William Ayers helped write Sen. Barack Obama’s biography. The professor, Dr. Peter Millican, teaches philosophy at Hertford College, Oxford. His software is designed to detect when works are by the same authors by comparing the use of similar words and phrases. The offer was revealed Sunday in a British newspaper. “He was entirely upfront about this,” the professor said of the Republican businessman who made the offer. “He offered me $10,000 and sent me electronic versions of the text from both books.” Read entire article…

From the Sunday Times Online (UK):

[..] The offer to Millican to prove that Ayers wrote Obama’s book was made by Robert Fox, a California businessman and brother-in-law of Chris Cannon, a Republican congressman from Utah. He hoped to corroborate a theory advanced by Jack Cashill, an American writer. Fox and Cannon each suggested to The Sunday Times that the other had taken the initiative. Cannon said that he merely recommended computer testing of the books. He doubted whether Obama wrote his autobiography, adding: “If Ayers was the author, that would be interesting.” Fox said he had hoped that Cannon would raise the $10,000 to run a computer test. “It was Congressman Cannon who initially pointed me in that direction and, from our conversation, I thought he might be able to find someone [to raise the $10,000].” He believed that if “proof” of Ayers’s involvement was provided by an Oxford academic it would be political dynamite. Fox contacted Millican, who said: “He was entirely upfront about this. He offered me $10,000 and sent me electronic versions of the text from both books.” Millican took a preliminary look and found the charges “very implausible”. A deal was agreed for more detailed research but when Millican said the results had to be made public, even if no link to Ayers was proved, interest waned. Millican said: “I thought it was extremely unlikely that we would get a positive result. It is the sort of thing where people make claims after seeing a few crude similarities and go overboard on them.” He said Fox gave him the impression that Cannon had got “cold feet about it being seen to be funded by the Republicans”.. [..]

I’d be curious to know where that $10,000 from the Congressman was to come from..

This is an act of unbelievable desperation. These people will stop at nothing.

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