Jerk Some Chains

This made Rebel Girl laugh. A lot. Maybe you will too.

—From this morning'sNew York Times, written by Kate Phillips:

Maybe William Ayers, the 1960s radical, has decided to have a little fun with all the conspiracies spooling out about him on the Internet.

This week, Anne Leary, a blogger who writes under the moniker BackyardConservative, posted a breathless account of the admission she said she wrested from William Ayers at Reagan National Airport recently, after he had attended an education conference in Arlington, Va.

She said Mr. Ayers revealed for the first time - to a relative stranger who had stopped him - that he had written "Dreams From My Father," the best-selling memoir of Barack Obama's life.

Ms. Leary's scoop climbed up memeorandum.com, the aggregation site that charts links and buzz on posts and articles, and she updated her own posts as she hit No. 2! Lots of links!

But by the time the news landed at No. 1, part of its popularity rested on the fact that Ms. Leary's reporting was being debunked. Jonah Goldberg, a conservative writer blogging at the National Review Online, pointed to a brief article in the National Journal magazine from last Friday, saying, "It sounds like Ayers is jerking some chains."

Two Sundays ago, Will Englund, a writer for the National Journal, confronted Mr. Ayers, a Chicago professor, at the Baltimore Book Festival, where the latter was promoting his book "Race Course." Mr. Englund wrote that after the book talk "we put the authorship question right to him."

Mr Englund added: "For a spilt second, Ayers was nonplussed. Then an Abbie Hoffmanish, steal-this-book-sort-of-smile lit up his face. He gently took National Journal by the arm. 'Here's what I'm going to say. This is my quote. Be sure to write it down: Yes I wrote 'dreams from My Father." I ghostwrote the whole thing. I met with the president three or four times, and then I wrote the entire book.' He released National Journal's arm, and beamed in Marxist triumph. "And now I would like the royalties."

Mr. Obama's book had garnered nearly $9 million in sales by last March, when he filed disclosure forms. Mr. Ayers's own book will probably not achieve such heights, but his recent tongue-in-cheek revelations have certainly pushed him higher up on any search engine.

A writer at The Daily Beast, the Web site run by Tina Brown, said he received this email reply from Mr. Ayers about the rumors that he had ghostwritten Mr. Obama's book: "You've all lost your minds. Best of luck in the twilight zone."

This reminds Rebel Girl of a favorite saying of Utah Phillips: "You've got to mess with people."

To read Anne Leary's account of Bill Ayers' "confession" on BackyardConservative, click here.