Bill Ayers, the unrepentant former leader of the Weather Underground domestic terrorist group and avowed (“small c”) communist, has admitted on numerous occasions over the past five years that he wrote “Dreams from My Father,” for which Barack Obama has taken full credit.

But Ayers always shades his admissions with a layer of irony, using the now familiar line, “yes I did, and if you can help me prove it, I’ll split the royalties with you.”

Ayers brought up the subject himself in an exchange with WND reporter and author Jerome Corsi prior to the Ayers/D’Souza debate that took place Thursday night at Dartmouth College.

The conversation took a familiar path, but toward the end, Corsi tried to cut through the irony, pointing out to Ayers that he typically says he wrote it and will split the royalties with anyone who can prove it.

Corsi asserted that Ayers’ familiar, ironic reply was a declaration that he doesn’t really mean what he’s saying, that he was “taking it back.”

“No, it does not take it back,” Ayers insisted. “It doesn’t?” asked Corsi. “No,” Ayers said.

“You wrote it?” “I wrote it,” Ayers said.

You can listen to the audio of the entire exchange, here.

Cashill has said that he believes Ayers, with his sharp intellect, had been “careful to couch his comments with irony.” But he thinks that Ayers’s irony is aimed not at critics like him but at the White House, “letting Obama know that he could blow Obama out of the water, if he gets serious about it” because Ayers is at odds with his old pal’s foreign policies – especially his use of drones, and his push for war with Syria. The former domestic terrorist said in an interview, last Summer that Obama should be put on trial for war crimes (like every other president.)

“All Ayers would have to do is give a press conference in which he demonstrated he was the principle craftsman behind ‘Dreams’ and the whole myth of Obama’s literary genius would come crashing down,” Cashill said.