Wednesday, September 15, 2010

In the current issue of Forbes...

...Dinesh D'Souza has a piece called, "How Obama Thinks." You may have heard of it. The article and Newt Gingrich's reaction to it in National Review are getting a lot of attention. Here are a couple of excerpts from the D'Souza piece (my emphasis):

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.

Incredible? I'd say a little wacky.

But instead of readying us for the challenge, our President is trapped in his father's time machine. Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation's agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son. The son makes it happen, but he candidly admits he is only living out his father's dream. The invisible father provides the inspiration, and the son dutifully gets the job done. America today is governed by a ghost.

I didn't use any emphasis because that whole paragraph requires emphasis. What on earth was D'Souza thinking?

But wait; it gets worse. There's Gingrich's reaction to the piece in National Review:

Gingrich says that D’Souza has made a “stunning insight” into Obama’s behavior — the “most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Barack Obama.”

“What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?” Gingrich asks. “That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior.”

And this guy wants to be president?

Now the National Review is a magazine for right wing cranks on the political fringe. (I thought so even in my Barry Goldwater/libertarian days; it's just not that good a publication.) So I'm not so surprised to find something like that there.

But Forbes is a mainstream publication. Or at least it was before the Internet. Now people have an almost unlimited array of information to choose from. So maybe Forbes was desperate for readers and felt like it had to run something outrageous in a bid for "eyeballs." In any event, I think D'Souza's piece says more about Forbes than anything else.

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