A post by Pat
The Left needs no proof that opposition to Barack Obama is based in racism. It is self-evident to them that those right-wingers are ipso facto bigotted jingoists. Yet, apparently the right-wingers need constant reminding in order to maintain their prejudice. This usually happens, according to the Left, in the form of codes. The latest coded message comes from Dinesh D’Souza in Forbes magazine. D’Souza’s theory is that Obama was imbued with his Kenyan father’s anti-colonialism. This singular motivator explains what D’Souza characterizes as Obama’s “bizarre” policy-making.
The Left reads the Forbes article as intellectualizing racism. Kenya is in Africa where black people live and that’s what it’s really all about, isn’t it? It is stigmatizing Obama as The Other. D’Souza is a birther in academic robes.
D’Souza acknowledges the theory that Obama is a European style socialist but rejects that explanation as inadequate. He unlocks Obama as the son whose saw his father representing a great and noble cause, the cause of anti-Colonialism. Obama is “the last anti-Colonial”.
It may seem incredible to suggest that the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United States. That is what I am saying. From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America’s military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father’s position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America. In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America’s power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe’s resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet.
Rejecting the socialist formula, Obama has shown no intention to nationalize the investment banks or the health sector. Rather, he seeks to decolonize these institutions, and this means bringing them under the government’s leash. That’s why Obama retains the right to refuse bailout paybacks–so that he can maintain his control. For Obama, health insurance companies on their own are oppressive racketeers, but once they submitted to federal oversight he was happy to do business with them. He even promised them expanded business as a result of his law forcing every American to buy health insurance.
If Obama shares his father’s anticolonial crusade, that would explain why he wants people who are already paying close to 50% of their income in overall taxes to pay even more. The anticolonialist believes that since the rich have prospered at the expense of others, their wealth doesn’t really belong to them; therefore whatever can be extracted from them is automatically just. Recall what Obama Sr. said in his 1965 paper: There is no tax rate too high, and even a 100% rate is justified under certain circumstances.
In an eerie conclusion, Obama writes that “I sat at my father’s grave and spoke to him through Africa’s red soil.” In a sense, through the earth itself, he communes with his father and receives his father’s spirit. Obama takes on his father’s struggle, not by recovering his body but by embracing his cause. He decides that where Obama Sr. failed, he will succeed. Obama Sr.’s hatred of the colonial system becomes Obama Jr.’s hatred; his botched attempt to set the world right defines his son’s objective. Through a kind of sacramental rite at the family tomb, the father’s struggle becomes the son’s birthright.
It is D’Souza’s thesis that is bizarre. There is nothing about Obama’s policy-making that requires deep analysis. Obama is way out there on the political Left. It doesn’t matter whether Leftists are overtly doctrinaire Marxists. Leftist politics has a basis that depends on a dichotomy of victim and oppressor—workers-owners, rich-poor, white-black (or people of color). The parasitic virus of collectivism can only grow in an environment of resentment. It isn’t “odd” that Obama insists the rich aren’t paying their fair share of taxes or that he demonizes banks. D’Souza says run-of-the-mill socialism doesn’t explain Obama’s foreign policy. Well, sure it does. It’s axiomatic on the Left that America is a bully. The anti-Colonialism of his father was a form of Marxist agitation.
There is nothing odd about Obama’s policy-making. It is textbook socialist. Obama goes only as far as he thinks he can get away with. There was a family influence on the young Obama but D’Souza is barking up the wrong side of the family tree. It was his mother’s side who influenced baby Barack. His mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was described by a friend:
Obama’s women reveal his secret
“If you were concerned about something going wrong in the world, Stanley would know about it first,” said Chip Wall, who described her as “a fellow traveler. . . We were liberals before we knew what liberals were.”
And his maternal grandparents. Barack Obama: Mother not just a girl from Kansas
…the parental traits that would mold him — a contrarian worldview, an initial rejection of organized religion, a questioning nature — were already taking shape years earlier in the nomadic and sometimes tempestuous Dunham family, where the only child was a curious and precocious daughter of a father who wanted a boy so badly that he named her Stanley — after himself.
Examples of the reaction from the Left to D’Souza:
Forbes’ Shameful Piece on Obama as the “Other”
So it’s come to this: Forbes cover story on “How Obama Thinks” is a gross piece of innuendo—a fact-twisting, error-laden piece of paranoia. This is the worst kind of smear journalism—a singularly disgusting work.
Forbes for some reason gives Dinesh D’Souza the cover and lots of space to froth about the notion popular in the right-wing fever swamps that Obama is an “other”; that he doesn’t think like “an American,”
…Dinesh D’Souza, who has been laundering the racism of the right through an “intellectual” filter since his days at Dartmouth
All of which to say is there’s no need to parse the ethnic origins or political philosophies of Obama’s parents to understand the ideology of Barack Obama. He is a center-left Democrat who supports mainstream Democratic policies. But some conservatives don’t want to talk about policy. They are unable to engage in an argument with liberalism on substantive terms; they know only argument by epithet. They want to talk about the fact that our blackety black president is blackety black. It has been two years since a black man was elected president of the United States, and for a group of conservatives clinging to their cultural superiority, this was a moment of apocalyptic existential crisis, a moment that refuted all they had come to know and understand about themselves, about black people, and about this country. D’Souza is writing for them, the same kind of audience he has always written for.
Dinesh D’Souza was born in India to Goan parents. He emigrated to the United States when he was 17. Not one of “them” for whom he is accused of writing.
It wasn’t out of bounds to talk about the psychological influence of G.W. Bush’s heritage with an undertone of “the other”.
TIME: So let’s start with your grandfather Prescott Bush. He was a patrician Connecticut banker and Senator, part of the old-line Yankee Wasp establishment.
TIME: Your father seemed torn between being a scion of this New England gentry and being the Texan that he cast himself as.
TIME: But isn’t there some of that old-line establishment blood left in you?
TIME: When did you decide to distance yourself from this background?
TIME: But you sure shared a lot of the same upbringing: Andover, Yale, even Skull and Bones. Did you have any qualms, say, about joining an elite secret club like Bones?
TIME: When did you decide you wanted to go into politics? …surely it was also because it was bred into your bones?
TIME: What are your feelings about affirmative action?
Obama is old-school socialism. The Americans who oppose this agenda don’t care about the color of his skin which can’t be said for some of Obama’s supporters like Bill Maher who thinks Obama would be a better president if he were “fully black” or a “real black” which to Maher implies being a gun-carrying thug.
nice sunday morning read. i think i read the article earlier this week.
i do have a question.
i wasn’t aware that urkel even wrote his own “auto” biographies, so it plays a little more into urkel being an inarticulate socialist puppet of bill ayres who matriculated into a more global socialist who guilted america into voting for him.
rick
No secret decoder ring required. PatQuote: “It is textbook socialist”.
Dreams from his mother.
I believe the socialist segment saw in BHO a clean slate upon which they could live out their fantasy for the USA. His torment over belonging to two worlds, not really at home in either and his obviously troubled childhood which led to him becoming a malginant narcissist, made him the perfect patsy. If he were not POTUS, I would pity him. As POTUS, I can only work to stop him and his cronies.
Can we please insists ALL our candidates be equally and exhaustively examined? Family history, education, published articles and books as well as all relavant documents revealed (especially long form birth certificates WITH name of birth hospital and attending physician) must be part of the vetting process….clearly that wasn’t the case in the last presidential election.
I agree with your observation that D’Souza is reading too much into Obama’s agenda. He overreached, and this gave the Left an excuse to go after him and the Right. I read the article last week and it felt like D’Souza was jumping too easily to his own conclusions, rather than considering other possibilities, which I could see. It would’ve been nice if he had exhausted those other possibilities before jumping back to his easy answer of “anti-colonialism”. He would’ve had a stronger argument. I think Glenn Beck did a better job of analyzing Obama’s motivations through his background with his mother and grandmother, as you pointed out, both of whom were involved with Marxist movements.
However, I strongly disagree with the liberal criticism that D’Souza is just laundering the right’s racism through a culturally relativistic argument. As D’Souza said, he grew up with anti-colonialist dogma in India, and he’s very familiar with it. The way I saw it was he was interpreting Obama through that lens. The only thing the Left has to hang their hat on is that D’Souza brings up Obama’s Kenyan father. Oh, that’s racist. Come on! This reminds me of a conversation I had with a young woman while I was in college who was taking feminist studies. She said she was learning to use gender-neutral language, and her teacher marked down her paper for using the male pronoun “he” to refer to a person who was a man! Can’t we talk about Obama’s background, which Obama himself wrote about in two books, without being smeared? This is a joke, right? Anti-colonialism is not just culturally “the other”. It’s existed in American universities for years, at least since the 1980s. And let’s just lay it out on the table: Anti-colonialism *is* anti-American, and by extension anti-Western, by its nature. This doesn’t mean it shouldn’t exist in academia, but I do think it should be challenged, as an intellectual exercise. For liberals to ignore the fact that anti-colonialism has existed in America for years is laughable. Many of them were steeped in it when they went through college. They are also very familiar with it. So who are we kidding here? Once again, the Left doesn’t like being exposed for what it is, so they try to distract people with the old standbys of, “Don’t call me anti-patriotic,” and, “You’re a racist!” These are specious arguments. As Dennis Miller likes to say, they’re a “poker tell”. D’Souza overreached, but he hit a nerve nevertheless. Rather than foaming at the mouth themselves, they should refute D’Souza’s arguments intelligently, just as you did, Pat.
As much as I like Dinesh D’Souza, I have to agree that he’s off the mark on this one. However, it came as no surprise that the Left’s Attack Dog immediately started crying racism.
Hey Liberals, has Chris Matthews’ powder white ass blinded all of you?
that bust of churchill was immediately shuttled back to england because of british colonialism in what is now kenya- and what happened to urkel’s family in the ‘homeland’. i said it then and i still believe it now. but this explains urkel’s raging personal hatred for the western democracies and why it is clearly pay back time for the obamas in this frivolous vanity driven regime of his.
in 2008 the untied states was Mau Mau’d- and lost.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa/article5276010.ece
and if it wasn’t for racist selfish capitalist pig america, obama sr. would never have come to study here- funded by american taxes so kenyans could be educated to be their country’s future leaders. and he would have never met stanley. and there would be no urkel. (i have a dream and it involves a time travel machine…)
but this is obama’s hang up, his personal baggage and how he chooses to internalize and project it on to others. pointing it out is pointing out his damage, definitely his parents’s world views are high lighted, not the motivations of those who oppose his ‘ bizarre policies’. there’s nothing bizarre about his policies. they are crystal clear. he’s a ham handed, tone deaf, not particularly politically adept socialist just like generations of liberal american politicians that proceeded him- mostly white males of a certain class who think america sucks when compared to any tinpot murderous communist regime in any 3rd world country. educated white males of privilege in the freest country in the world pontificating about being oppressed merely so they can oppress others- because that’s their real motivation. revenge and power, the reasons most politicians do what they do.
i don’t care about his reasons , who gives a f about the deep inner promptings of a damaged and malicious soul who has a dangerous amount of power? what’s more important- stopping ted bundy from murdering women or elucidating his inner reasoning for such a profound hatred of women ? whatever his reasons for doing what he’s doing to this country, i want it stopped first. he is violating the constitution and laying waste to our economy and that is why so many are opposed to him- not because of whom his mommy and daddy may be and what color they were. the one hung up on race perpetually is urkel himself, the first mongrel president.
and it just reminds one of the genius of the founders that only native born americans could be president and the tragedy that there are so many born here in power now who are the ones with such scant regard for Her founding principles. people come here to escape places like kenya post WW2- to be rid of all the failings of the old world with it’s unelected aristocracies , theocracies , failed empires, and fascists. the pogroms, the witch burnings, the holocausts and the genocides that still rage across sub- saharan africa .it so sad now to think it is americans like urkel and stanley who hold such scant regard for the preciousness of our freedoms, that they wish everyone to be enslaved again by all that so many risked everything to escape. america has been the real Hope for so many across the globe for several hundred years. only a fascist tyrant would want to take america away from the world. or a pouty spoiled self absorbed brat with a degree signed by more of the same.
urkel is the grinch- there, all explained. now let’s get rid of it. there will be plenty of time under president palin to explain urkel.