Yesterday afternoon on MSNBC, Andrew Breitbart had himself a good old-fashioned meltdown on Martin Bashir, and in the process took a moment to defend the “compelling” arguments put forth by Jack Cashill regarding the authorship of Barack Obama's memoir, Dreams from My Father. Cashill contends that it was ghostwritten by Bill Ayers. Reality and common sense would have it otherwise. Cashill also thinks obviously Photoshopped photos of Obama are real. Again, reality and Obama's disembodied knee speak to a different truth.

But just for laughs, let's take a look at an especially “compelling” portion of Cashill's book, Deconstructing Obama, that endeavors to explain the truth behind Barack Obama's parentage and background -- specifically, that Obama's real father was an anonymous African American from Seattle, and Obama's grandfather bribed Barack Obama Sr. to pose as the child's father.

Given these understandings, serious people have questioned whether the adventurous Ann [Dunham] might not have coupled with a young “negro” she had met at one of those hip Seattle coffeehouses that she frequented. Ann never dated “the crew-cut white boys,” affirmed friend Susan Boykin. If a black guy had impregnated Ann, this would explain the family's abrupt departure to Hawaii, the one state in the union where a mixed-race baby could grow up almost unnoticed. It certainly explains the move to Hawaii better than the illusory rationale Obama offers in Dreams.

This scenario makes sense of any number of details, including Stanley Dunham's sudden eagerness to move without promotion to Hawaii; Madelyn's willingness to quit her job as an escrow officer in nearby Bellevue, Washington; Ann's angry resistance to the move; her poor performance in her limited first-semester courses at the University of Hawaii; her failure to enroll for the second semester; and, most of all, her otherwise inexplicable return to Washington in August 1961 -- if not earlier.

True, to make this scenario work, we have to add one more major variable, but it is a plausible one. Imagine Ann coming home from class one day in Hawaii in fall 1960 in one of her all-concealing muumuus -- she had written Botkin that muumuus were worn on campus -- and telling her father that there was this charming, larger-than-life Kenyan in her class. The scheming Stanley asks her to invite him over for dinner.

Stanley befriends Barack Sr. and enlists him in his plot. He explains that a boy named Barack, the legitimate son of a Kenyan, could move through American life more seamlessly than a boy named, say, Johnny, the illegitimate son of an American black. It may not have been fair, but it was true. He tells Barack Sr. that he can make it worth his while. Ann understands. Madelyn is dubious about all this -- she is paying the bills -- but she plays along.

As to Barack Sr., he has to contribute nothing to the proceedings but his name. No marriage announcement will appear in the Honolulu papers. Ann will leave in time for the fall semester at the University of Washington -- perhaps months before -- and she will not return until he leaves for graduate school. The address she provides for the birth announcement is eight miles from the university, so she will not embarrass him by hanging around campus. [Deconstructing Obama, pages 263-265]

This is from the mind of the man Breitbart finds “compelling.”