A bumbling new chapter in the saga who wrote "Dreams from My Father"?

The other day we were talking about the theory that William Ayers -- Obama's ex-terrorist neighbor -- had actually ghost-written Obama's memoir "Dreams from My Father." I think, in the comments, there are some allusions to the kind of computer analysis that is used in literary scholarship to figure out if a known author has written a particular work that is attributed to him.

Now, we see this about "Dr Peter Millican, a philosophy don at Hertford College, Oxford, [who] has devised a computer software program that can detect when works are by the same author by comparing favourite words and phrases." He's been contacted by "Robert Fox, a California businessman and brother-in-law of Chris Cannon, a Republican congressman from Utah" about running the test on Obama's book and Ayers's.

“He was entirely upfront about this. He offered me $10,000 and sent me electronic versions of the text from both books.” [Millican said.]

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 find it hard to believe that if Millican had the digital files that he could resist running them through his computer program out of sheer curiosity. I wonder what "took a preliminary look" means. You have a program and you have the digital files. I don't quite understand. But Millican makes it sound like Cannon and Fox backed out when they thought the news would probably be that Ayers is not the ghostwriter and that the public would be told. But that's what nearly everyone already thinks, and Millican has essentially gone ahead and told us so.

Why didn't Cannon and Fox strike a deal with Millican before sending him the digital files? Then Millican wouldn't have had his own knowledge of the results (preliminary or not) when negotiating. Why would Cannon and Fox care about suppressing the information if it turns out to be what people expect when they could have had Millican obliged to vouch for the result if it happened to be what they were hoping for?

Cannon insisted, however, that he was not interested in making an issue of Obama’s memoir “even if it were scientifically proven” to be someone else’s work.

Huh? If there's one thing in this whole story that reeks of lying, it's that. Cannon and Fox -- what bumblers!

IN THE COMMENTS: Larry says, "This may well have been the most wingnutty, wingnut idea of this election." Oh, I don't know. There's this.