Forbes magazine has now “fact-checked” Dinesh D’Souza’s infamous September 27 cover story, “How Obama Thinks,” and has uncovered one “slight” misrepresentation, it says, of an Obama speech on the BP oil spill. Such a “fact-checking” feint is irrelevant to this travesty of an article; you can’t “fact-check” a fever dream of paranoia and irrationality. Sickeningly, while “How Obama Thinks” is useless as a guide to the Obama presidency, it is all too representative of the hysteria that now runs through a significant portion of the right-wing media establishment. The article is worth analyzing at some length as an example of the lunacy that is poisoning much conservative discourse.
D’Souza argues that Obama’s policies are motivated by a hatred towards American power absorbed from his Kenyan father. He offers exactly zero evidence for his hackneyed psychological theory. But the most laughable weakness in D’Souza’s thesis is the fact that the policies which D’Souza presents as the “dreams of a Luo tribesman” have a decades-long American pedigree and are embraced by wide swathes of the American electorate and political class. If support for progressive taxation, greater government regulation of health care, stimulus spending, and conservation make one the tool of the African anticolonial movement, then Paul Krugman, Robert Reich, Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, John Kenneth Galbraith, FDR, and the Sierra Club are all Third World agents provocateurs.
D’Souza attributes Obama’s tax policies, for example, to his anticolonialism pact with his dead father:
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.
Never mind that Washington Democrats and pundits have been calling for the rich to finally pay their “fair share” long before Obama came on the scene. Suddenly, soaking the rich is a black African import—at least when a black president embraces the program.
Obamacare is likewise an outcropping of a filial crusade to vindicate a deceased African progenitor, in D’Souza’s view:
Obama seeks to decolonize [the health sector], and this means bringing [it] under the government’s leash. . . . 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.
(D’Souza tries to make a fine distinction here between “socializing” the health sector, which he says that Obama forswears, and “decolonizing” it. I have no idea what he is talking about.)
Barney Frank and John Conyers regularly railed against the greedy insurance companies during the health care debate. D’Souza would quite possibly see in Conyers’ denunciations another African relic, but what about Barney Frank? A mandate for universal coverage is the necessary flip-side to the ban on excluding pre-existing conditions—a widely embraced goal of conventional health care reform; it has nothing to do with a “decolonizing” mission, whatever that means. Moreover, liberals denounced Obama for his distance from the health care debate, yet somehow the final results are the product of a Kenyan mindset.
D’Souza’s twisted hermeneutics are unending. After the BP oil spill, Obama railed against America’s disproportionate consumption of oil and its “century-long addiction to fossil fuels.” Where have I heard those criticisms before? Just about from every Democratic politician and a large number of Republicans as well. D’Souza finds it part of Obama’s “strange behavior,” however, that he would denounce America’s oil appetite after the oil spill, a gesture that has a patent political, as well as a not implausible substantive, logic.
In fact, there is not a single policy that Obama has pursued since taking office that does not grow out of the American tradition of left-wing liberalism or more immediately out of the Bush Administration, the latter including bailouts of Detroit and Wall Street, drone strikes in Pakistan, continuation of the doomed Freedom Agenda in Afghanistan, and invocations of the state secrets act to protect anti-terror actions from judicial scrutiny.
But D’Souza is determined to present Obama as an alien within the body politic. He opens his article with an anaphoric refrain of strangeness and foreignness:
The President’s actions are so bizarre that they mystify his critics and supporters alike. . . . More strange behavior . . . The oddities go on and on . . . Obama’s foreign policy is no less strange.
The only thing strange here is D’Souza’s interpretation of Obama’s standard-issue liberalism as a scary foreign import.
So what is D’Souza’s evidence for the Africanization of American politics? The best he can come up with are statements in Obama’s autobiography about his effort to emotionally connect with the deceased father he saw only once at age 10, after having been abandoned by the man at age two.
The climax of Obama’s narrative, [writes D’Souza], is when he goes to Kenya and weeps at his father’s grave. It is riveting: “When my tears were finally spent,” he writes, “I felt a calmness wash over me. I felt the circle finally close. I realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America–the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I’d felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I’d witnessed in Chicago–all of it was connected with this small piece of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin. The pain that I felt was my father’s pain.”
Though conservatives are supposed to believe in family values, even in less-than-ideal circumstances, D’Souza dismisses this moment of imaginative reconciliation as merely the declaration of a political program. Leaving aside for the moment the absence of any factual basis for his theory of paternal political influence, D’Souza’s disparagement of Obama, Sr., after the son’s gesture of forgiveness, comes off as jarring and tasteless:
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.
Obama’s effort in his autobiography to tie together the disparate elements of his life—to connect his “life in America” with an absent father–is dictated as much by literary convention as by felt experience. It is the sum total, however, of D’Souza’s textual support for his bizarre thesis. Undaunted, D’Souza goes on a rampage of confident mind-reading:
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.
One would think that D’Souza could provide some textual support for these claims regarding Obama’s worldview, leaving aside their alleged provenance in mid-century Kenya. He does not. Instead, he has the gall to present the absence of evidence as evidence. D’Souza’s main source for Obama, Sr.’s anticolonial thinking is a 1965 article in the East Africa Journal called “Problems Facing Our Socialism,” in which, according to D’Souza, Obama, Sr., called for state ownership of private land. D’Souza presents no evidence that Obama, Jr., even read the article or was influenced by it. For D’Souza, this absence of a mention is a smoking gun:
Remarkably, President Obama, who knows his father’s history very well, has never mentioned his father’s article. Even more remarkably, there has been virtually no reporting on a document that seems directly relevant to what the junior Obama is doing in the White House.
With such a historical technique, there is nothing that D’Souza can’t prove. Obama, Jr., also has never mentioned the royalist philosopher Joseph de Maistre’s 1798 anti-Protestant essay, “Reflections on Protestantism in its Relation to Sovereignty.” Does that mean that Obama, Jr., seeks to shore up the power of the Catholic Church against the assault of atheistic Protestantism?
D’Souza soon reaches a climax of pop psychoanalyzing:
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. [Source, please?] 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.
Besides such unmoored speculations, D’Souza also traffics in claims that are patently contradicted by the facts. His use of 9/11 and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as a plank in his Obama-the-anticolonialist-crusader thesis is particularly confusing. He writes:
From the anticolonial perspective, American imperialism is on a rampage. . . . 9/11 provided the occasion for America to invade and occupy two countries, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Maybe so, but Obama has escalated the war in Afghanistan, so how are his policies there anticolonial?
Any pretense of logic regarding 9/11 then breaks down completely:
Obama supports the Ground Zero mosque because to him 9/11 is the event that unleashed the American bogey and pushed us into Iraq and Afghanistan.
If 9/11 pushed America into a war that Obama is voluntarily prosecuting, how does supporting the Ground Zero mosque relate to that fact? New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg is a far more vocal proponent of the Ground Zero mosque than Obama; does that make him an anticolonialist, too?
Even if it were the case that Obama embraces the standard liberal playbook for reasons of personal history—a position for which D’Souza has provided no evidence—so what? If Obama were not president, millions of people would still support the policies of his presidency under a different Democratic leader, as they have been doing for decades.
Some critics of the idiotic pseudo-theory of language known as deconstruction used a similarly baseless tactic when literary theorist Paul DeMan’s youthful contributions to a collaborationist Belgian journal were discovered. “You see!” the critics brayed. “Deconstruction is part of the Nazi project.” This opportunistic argument overlooked the fact that a range of people whose backgrounds bore no resemblance to DeMan’s, such as Jacques Derrida, had contributed to the development of deconstruction, which could be discredited on its face, without any psychological overlay.
Liberals engage in their own armchair psychologizing, of course. All the more reason for conservatives to forswear the tactic. But D’Souza’s screed is just the latest manifestation of the rebirth of the conservative hysteria that marked the Clinton era. The fact that both Clinton and Obama’s critics became obsessed with the person rather than his policies suggests that those critics have no faith in the public’s ability to grapple with abstract issues, rather than alleged personal failings. The shrillness of the hysteria around the last two Democratic presidents also suggests a conservative sense of entitlement towards holding power.
David Frum has eloquently blasted Newt Gingrich for embracing D’Souza’s “How Obama Thinks,” which Frum calls a “brazen outburst of race-baiting.” Unfortunately, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, who have also endorsed D’Souza’s Forbes ravings, have far more influence than Gingrich. When the book on which the Forbes article was based comes out on October 4, we can expect a blitz on the conservative media. Perhaps The Roots of Obama’s Rage will provide the arguments so sorely lacking in D’Souza’s article. If it does not, Regnery Publishing comes out of this episode far more discredited than Forbes. And any talk show host who gives D’Souza a platform will be further poisoning American political discourse. I would also hope that King’s College, a Christian school in New York City, is having buyer’s remorse about making D’Souza its president.
Political hatred and fear should be summoned forth only under the most exigent of circumstances. D’Souza has failed completely to make the case for unleashing his incendiary brand of irrationality.
It’s very silly of D’Souza to try to draw straight lines between his parents’ ideologies and, say, Obama’s response to the BP oil spill.
But, certainly, a form of anti-colonialism was inculcated in the President by his mother, as Obama describes at great length in his memoirs. She used his biological father as a prop, a statue of anti-colonial rectitude, in her war for influence over little Barry with her unsatisfactory second husband who was selling out to neocolonial power by working for an American oil company.
Certainly, Rev. Wright preached anti-colonialism, too.
During Obama’s visit to Kenya in 1988, he agrees with his half sister Auma that the good service provided by a waiter to a white American family of tourists shows that Kenya is the “whore of Africa.” There are lots and lots more details like this.
Of course, anti-colonialism is just a subtheme in a book rightly subtitled “A Story of Race and Inheritance.” The main theme is “Race.”
D’Souza:
“people who are already paying close to 50% of their income in overall taxes”
This is false.
http://www.ctj.org/pdf/taxday2009.pdf
It would be extremely helpful if our liberal media representatives began to point this out. Thank you.
Bozzy’s post is worth a fisking, IMO. I’ll ask other posters to forgive my indulgence.
I’m sure you know how it’s like to grow up black in America.
I grew up in the Rio Grande Valley, where I was part of a 10-15% minority. I have some idea.
Or better yet, grow up half-black and half-white when every white person will always refer to you as black.
You mean when he was attending one of the best prep schools in Hawaii, the poor dear.
Plus, you’re growing up in a time when less than 10 yrs prior people were being lynched and half-blacks were especially targeted.
In regions far, far away from Hawaii, or even Chicago, where blacks are way, way more likely to be capped by other members of their own race, I’m sorry to say.
I know it’s really hard for hard right wingers to put themselves in other peoples shoes.
But, you, you have no problem projecting, do you, bozzy?
Maybe you should sit and read Michelle Obama’s with a dictionary next to you. Then maybe you would understand and be able to read it.
You have no idea what the term “unreadable” means, do you? Physician, heal thyself. Get thee a better understanding of the English language.
Leave it to a racist to identify a racist.
Oh, so you think the Obamas are racist. Well, thanks for admitting that. I wouldn’t go that far myself, but it’s a free country.
I love how all of these supposed race blind folks throw out racially tinged comments.
Who said I was race-blind? I can see race and its interactions quite clearly without becoming a screaming douchebag like you.
Ill-gotten shakedown funds? That’s right, I forgot. No black folks have ever been discriminated against, they’re just lazy.
Michelle Obama was given a job in some hazily labeled capacity as a diversity manager. It paid six figures. She got it right after her husband was elected Senator. You don’t think that stinks? I’ll guess you’ll forgive anything.
At any rate, all your weeping and crying and self-pity over events that took place more than a half a century ago is besides the point. The man is President of the United States. He’s supposed to rise above that stuff. The question is, has he? Apparently one of his supporters never will.
Oh, that’s rich.
Steve Sailor is snarking about Obama’s obsession with race!
Obama’s father’s dream was not about transferring resources from rich to poor, but from white to black, the same political goal for the vast majority of black voters in America. Overwhelming majorities of black American voters simply vote for whichever candidate they think will allocate the most social resources to blacks that have been taken from whites. Skin color of the politician is irrelevant. BTW, I grew up in a neighborhood where my age cohort was over fifty percent black, so I know of what I speak.
Arguably the greatest politician of the last fifty years, Lew Kwan Yew noted that in a multi-ethnic society people will make common cause with their co-ethnics. The objective reality of ethnic groupings is among the most import factors in politics everywhere. Calling anyone interested in politics “race obsessed” is like calling a physicist “atomic particle obsessed”.
Anywhere politics exists, race is important.
This whole topic is overwrought and tiresome.
Obama’s actual performance as president is the only issue at hand.
However, I don’t find Heather MacDonald’s analysis any more credible than D’Souza’s.
One wishes to highlight facts from Obama’s life and divine grand meaning in everything he’s doing as president (D’Souza)……
…….and the other (MacDonald) wishes to gloss over them.
YAWN…….superfluous, at best.
While I agree with nearly everything you say, you kind of spoil it near the end when you elude to the “idiotic pseudo-theory of language known as deconstruction,” which is nearly as thoughtless and sloppy a construction as “Obama the Kenyan anti-colonalist.”
“Paul Krugman, Robert Reich, Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, John Kenneth Galbraith, FDR, and the Sierra Club are all Third World agents provocateurs.”
Tomorrow’s Drudge and ‘Newsbusters’ headlines:
Liberal Blogger Heather Mac Donald Reveals Pelosi, Gore to be Foreign Agents!
you kind of spoil it near the end when you elude to the “idiotic pseudo-theory of language known as deconstruction,” which is nearly as thoughtless and sloppy a construction as
hm. watch who you call sloppy. “elude” instead of “allude”? in any case, heather knows whereof she speaks, she used to be a deconstructionist herself if i recall her intellectual history correctly.
Calling anyone interested in politics “race obsessed” is like calling a physicist “atomic particle obsessed”.
Anywhere politics exists, race is important.
Well, Lee Kwan Yew didn’t advertise himself as some sort of post-racial messiah, thus the pertinence of these arguments against Obama.
Hmmm. D’Souza’s thesis basis was a) Obama’s book, b) his knowledge and experience with colonialism, and c) facts of Obama Sr.’s life. What is “hateful” here? The politics of insult is getting old, very fast.
I believe the term is not anti-colonialist but post-colonialist. Near as I can tell, that applies to people who are mostly interested in wreaking vengeance for the past of colonialism rather than soberly look at what sort of policies actually benefit people today.
A long time ago I used to play chess at the local club. One of the regulars was a pretty successful black businessman. He fit in. Everyone liked him. I liked him. But he had this calculation where he totaled up the estimated unpaid wages from African slaves. He then applied some interest rate to get a figure somewhat larger than the current net worth of the United States, both governmental and privately held.
In short, he openly stated that blacks were the rightful owners of everything existing in the US. No, this is not a rare position in black America. I’ve also encountered whites who hold a similar position.
I don’t doubt that this position is quite prevalent in Obama’s past social circles, so I would think it entirely plausible to entertain the notion that Obama holds similar sentiments.
Al Gore won 90% of that voting block, so why do people continue to use this talking point that President Obama’s black supporters support him simply because he is black? I’ve never heard a white man accused of the same for voting for Clinton or Bush.
White, Southern males vote for white Republicans at about an 80% clip, or better. They have also often been accused of racism, which they vehemently deny, the South having changed overnight in 1964, you know.
What is ironic is that they then turn around and use the same argument to contend that blacks are racist because they vote for the black guy. The fact that blacks voted for Obama at greater than 90% is continuously raised to support the now common right wing trope that blacks are racist.
Given that there had never before been a black candidate for president and, as an historically oppressed group, it is a wonder 100% of blacks didn’t vote for Obama.
Why does D’Souza care if Obama is politically influenced by his father’s worldview? Heather MacDonald thankfully points out that such a patriarchal intellectual inheritance would make little difference to Obama’s presidency, but she could’ve gone further in pointing out the far right’s hypocrisy on such matters: for instance, weren’t D’Souza and his cohort incensed when lefties were accusing George W. Bush of waging the Iraq war as a way to avenge his father against Saddam? The charge was ludicrous, of course, but it was also, moreover, irrelevant, as many on the right then pointed out. So why is Obama’s relation to his father– and his ability to make his own political decisions– treated any differently?
FACT (rassmusen presidential polls):
Date 9/29/2010
Presidential Approval Index -14
Strongly Approve 29%
Strongly Disapprove 43%
Total Approve 46%
Total Disapprove 52%
You can smear this guy all you want, but facts don’t lie, Obamas approval is weak, has been weak, and will continue to be weak.
If Obama is the “savior” or “the messiah”, then why does the majority of AMERICANS disapprove?
Obama is a puppet, a slick talker, put into power by the true “rulers” of the world (builderburger) just like the previous administration, who is pulling the strings? Us Americans are FED UP, and MAD AS HELL with people like this running the country.
Its sad that this guy speaks the truth and you smear him to no end….and why is that? Seems like you are being a bit defensive over someone you perceive as not credible.
Obama and his cabinet is no question anti-colonial (look at his record as president, and record previous)
You should be ashamed of yourself defending this president. You need to take a serious look at yourself and get back to the basics of what this country was founded on, and if you don’t like it….leave. There are plenty of other countries that will be more willing to bend to your will and power mongering.
@Trajan, how do you make the leap from Bobby Rush beating a young and unknown Obama to him getting beat in the present by Jesse Jackson. Please explain that reasoning. Secondly you ask about voting in a bloc? You failed to answer the question, how many people of color do you think the average white conservative has voted for? Now, I know this is playing inside baseball but I gave you geographical statistics. It’s easy to see where the blocs exist and it’s in the south. Lastly, before you go saying Black people voted based on color are John Kerry or Al Gore Black? Just wondering. Fact is most Black people see Democrats as the more viable option. John McCain thought it was a good idea to choose Palin as his VP. I’m sorry but that right there proved he was not ready for the job and many of us saw that and voted for the better candidate. Lastly lastly until the GOP does a better job of promoting their agenda in our community Dems will continue to get 90+% of the votes in our community.
All this overcomplicates things. lets go for parsimony. He is a liberal. A pretty far left one. He also (only child raised in the 1970s) has a pretty inflated sense of self. There. BHO pretty much explained. But I guess that wouldn’t get me a six figure book deal. I wonder if I can write one that talks about Palin and her deeply rooted psychos as a child moved to Alaska in the 1960s.
A postscript.
I also think a lot of the efforts to put BHO into a “black” category a) ignore how race and ethnicity are radically different in respect to categories and biases in Hawaii than on the mainland and b) fails to really connect BHO and his experience to those experienced by many (the majority?) of prominent black politicians operating on the National Scence.
For example, BHO had limited (no?) familial experience with Jim Crow; did not have a familial connection to the “Second great migration” from the interior south to the northern industrial cities during the 1910s and 1920s; did not have family which experienced the civil rights movement in its variety of phases. These are defining experience for many of America’s prominent politicians – just as WWII was a defining moment for many politicians who came to power in the 50s, 60s, and 70s or how for many conservatives Reagans election in 1980 remains a central loadstone.
This isnt’ to say he isn’t “black” or that he is somehow less authentic but it is to say that we cheapen our arguments (and are little better than prejudiced racists) to try to lump BHO with other african-americans and use their race as explaining the alignment they share in their policies are somehow evidence of their “blackness”. Rather, it could be that black, white or whatever certain people can (mistakenly in my opinion), embrace liberal solutions to most problems.
trajan,
You, possibly, revealed your age range by referring to your classmates at Berkeley during the Bush II administration. I’m so glad you did. It explains a lot.
When you make statements like this:
“The Black Democratic establishment was skeptical that Obama would be able to get enough White votes to win the Party’s nomination, let alone the presidency.At the time, many of them thought that he would be another Jesse Jackson.”
or this:
“Black Republicans are viewed with tremendous suspicion and disdain by their fellow Blacks.”
You make these statements like they’re irrefutable. It’s kinda funny.
Perhaps now I can presume what I was presuming earlier, trajan: Are in your early 30s or younger? Regardless, you sound like it, and I don’t mean that as a slur.
It’s like you think you’re onto something (and to be honest, you are). But it’s only about 30% of the picture. And sadly, you seem more interested in holding onto your preconceived notions and less concerned about reality.
And unfortunately, there are a ton of cohorts out there — talk radio hosts and of the like — who will, directly or indirectly, encourage you to continue down the path you’re on. Ruefully, putative conservativism has become a pathetic religious cult and we’re all witnessing the results.
Your comment, for example, about African-American attitudes toward African-American GOP-ers: “tremendous suspicion and disdain”? Really? lol Well, first of all, that may depend on who we’re talking about. Obviously, you’re not talking about Colin Powell, or even someone like Robert Woodson, and you’re probably not even talking about Clarence Thomas either — not if you really looked into it.
It’s not like Clarence Thomas’ friends and family disowned him. rajan, tons of black GOP-ers have always had black friends that span the entire political spectrum (I know. I was one of them.)
Believe me, being a black GOP-er isn’t “hell” and being a black Democrat hardly guarantees you praise. Indeed, most blacks are Democrats, kinda like most Jews are Democrats, but it’s not like black GOP-ers are looking over their shoulders in fear of sniper fire. Some of their best friends are their political “enemies” — and vice versa.
It is obvious that the American left (including the Obama admin and the Democrats in congress) has embraced an anti-white agenda. I am not terribly interested in why, although I agree that D’Souza’s explanation is farfetched.
The original and unacknowledged source of D’Souza’ core thesis of the influence of the father on Obama can be found here:
http://blog.mises.org/8007/obama-hid-his-fathers-socialism-from-readers/
The author is not responsible for anything written by D’Souza.
““The Black Democratic establishment was skeptical that Obama would be able to get enough White votes to win the Party’s nomination, let alone the presidency”
This is just a simple matter of having paid attention to Obama’s polling numbers with blacks before he won a primary. They favored Clinton over him. Once he won Iowa, his numbers among blacks started to pass hers.
Fascinating that some here are so attached to a teleprompter.
Has anyone ever read Presbo’s gorilla poem?
That is the real measure of his intellect.
I can divine the meanings as well as D’Souza. I know what that bow tie signifies.
@ netobserver, good comments. It is interesting how Trajan is telling Black people about our community as if he is an expert. I lived in the 1st congressional district in 2000 when Obama ran against Rush and all the stories about it being a dirty campaign are really just exagerations of events. Obama was an unknown and Rush was/is a highly visible politician so no newcomer was going to win that seat. He’s an outsider looking in.
@ Mike, when in the history of this country has anything been anti-white? You have got to be kidding. Any laws passed to prevent you from voting? How EXACTLY are the left, last I checked the majority were white, doing anything to make life harder for whites? I am really looking forward to this one.
Anti white? It’s worse than that.
Google white ivy 4h ROTC male
The discrimination against white male nonurbans is huge
Plus there are many set asides in Gubmint bids for minorities and likewise in the private sector .
Presbo, who lacks any skillsets beyond 50′ of a TelePrompTer, is ample proof of how far one can go with an Affirmative Action resume
So that explains why there are soooooo many Black and Latinos in ROTC programs at Ivy League schools. Man, how do you survive in such an environment with all this AA running around. Next thing you know people of color woll make up a whole 10% of upper management jobs. Oh the horror! The white male is sooooo oppressed, how do you make it from day to day? Maybe it’s the 300+ years there was exclusively white male Affirmative Action but that’s another topic for another day. Hmmm, I wish you strength because we all know how hard you have it nowadays with all that the government does for people of color. Dick Cheney and Halliburton better watch out huh? Sounds just as outrageous as this new Christian persecution complex. Let me get the tears ready for you. Why don’t you google Tulsa riots 1921 to see what REAL discrimination looks like.
Barack Obama was president of the Harvard Law Review and graduated magna cum laude while John McCain graduated near the bottom of his class and would not have been accepted to flight school had it not been for his father. You want to talk about Affirmative Action? Wow Panglos, your obervational powers are a bit off kilter. It’s people like McCain, Palin and O’Donnell (who just last month finally got her college degree) that benefit from a system that rewards mediocrity. Typical undereducated and a sense of entitlement is what I see. Stop blaming AA for your own failures such as the failure of the other party to nominate good candidates. Even if it was AA that got Obama into Harvard law school he excelled, maybe in your world that slot should have gone to a Palin huh? Seems to me Harvard got their money’s worth huh. Go listen to Rush and go to your Klan meeting, you’ll feel better.
Pot, meet kettle.
Facts are stubborn things.
Oh, noes! You’re going to take McCain?!! What would conservatives do without him backstabbing their most important iniatives? Palin, too! And O’Donnel, too! God know how much love they enjoy at a site called Secular Right.
Tell you what, Pilot, you get rid of AA and disparate impact legislation, and you can have’em, along with Dubya and the other legacy and dynastic mediocrities. We’ll even put their heads on a pike, like was done in England before things got all sappy.
We gotta deal?
@David: re CTJ, do you really believe it takes income of $1.445 million to be in the top 1% of earners? Seems way high to me.
@Net Observer: Your comments above re black republicans/conservatives intrigue me. You say that “most” black people are or vote Democrat(ic). But are you aware that in every presidential election since 1972, the Democratic presidential candidate has received at least 90% of the black vote? The very fact that you underplay this overwhelming preference makes me doubt your assessment of the disdain with which black concervatives are viewed by other blacks. In 1996, I was present when a black man was described by a group of other blacks as an “Oreo.” His crime? He was U.C. Berkeley’s public information officer, and when interviewed on local news as to what the university’s response to Prop. 209 would be, he responded, “we’ll follow the law.” See? When you’re black, it really doesn’t take much to be considered a race traitor. E-mail me any time with your cogent remarks.
vipltd21@gmail.com
“Man, how do you survive in such an environment with all this AA running around.”
Well in the 1975 recession after graduating from college, I painted houses…having lost at least one entry level management job admittingly for the sin of being the wrong color. Most major corporations were limiting new hires to minorities in order to conform to new standards of AA.
“Even if it was AA that got Obama into Harvard law school he excelled”
To wit?
We certainly cant judge by anything he wrote in the Law Review, or his undisclosed grades or thesis.
But maybe his ape poem will prove your point:
………….
Underground
Under water grottos, caverns
Filled with apes
That eat figs.
Stepping on the figs
That the apes
Eat, they crunch.
The apes howl, bare
Their fangs, dance,
Tumble in the
Rushing water,
Musty, wet pelts
Glistening in the blue.
……………………..
Hmm, no – I dont think so
His ape poem, indeed.
I donated to and voted for Barack Obama. It’s only in office, through his performance, that I concluded before D’Souza’s messy article, that not only was Obama not a particularly American Persona, he was particulary NOT an American Persona.
Guess I must have been a besainted tolerant progressive whne I voted for him, and a rightwing bigot now that I think that was a mistake.
Obama’s presidency has not only soured me on him, but even more so on those who call themselves liberals and progressives.
This entire article truly debunks nothing and adds to the long list of published rebuttals w/o support. Take for example your rebuttal on BP “D’Souza’s twisted hermeneutics are unending. After the BP oil spill, Obama railed against America’s disproportionate consumption of oil and its ….(condensed) implausible substantive, logic.
You argue this is a position most Democrats support, reducing our use of fossil fuels. Well, yes that is true. Where Obama differs is that he instead loans money to Brazil to continue drilling in even deeper waters, and mexico in the same water. Most Democrats would not support that. They want an end to drilling and a reduction in greenhouse gases. The anticolonialist Obama simply wants the US to stop drilling, and instead wants to support the “exploited” with the “exploiters” money and let them drill away.
There is much more at work with Obama. He is not really a liberal, and the progressives in the party do not support him as we see every day with comments from Gibbs likke the “professional left”. D’souza is more right than wrong on this one.
Why would anyone want a reduction in greenhouse gasses
It is at historically low levels despite fossil fuel use
When the fossils were still live these gasses were many times higher
The meteoric levels of CO2 allowed for far more vigourous plant growth
Well, the site is still “Secular.” Not sure about the “Right” bit anymore.
I detest people trying to tie religion into the resurgent conservative movement. It is a mistake, however, to try to paint people like D’Souza as representative of the Right in majority. That’s simply not even close to being true.
I’m reading these comments and I’m not seeing a lot of conservatism. Looks more like a typical raving moonbat thread over at DU, to me.
I’m reading these comments and I’m not seeing a lot of conservatism. Looks more like a typical raving moonbat thread over at DU, to me.
most of the comments are one or two-offs by ppl coming in through referrals (mostly liberal and libertarian websites). you’re free to judge a website by the nature of comments in one post i guess. seems kind of stupid to me, but we all have our criteria.
My friends,
Do not dispair. Nothing can change the truth or prevent Gods will. Dinesh is not an idiot or a fool. In fact he may be accurate but has he really said anything that should upset you? My friends their is no cause to berate Dinesh or to lower yourself to name calling.
Obama has been chosen and through the power of our prayers Allah has answered. Obama shall lead us to the promised land. There is nothing to fear in this anti-colonialism Dinesh mentions.
America is now on a path that will move it closer to Gods wishes and the world will be a better place as a result. Time is the great revealer, and in time all shall see.
In the name of the Merciful and Compassionate God,
Praise belongs to Allah
“Obama has been chosen….” to head the most disastrous midterm election in the history of democracy.
In defense of more green house gasses:
http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=4331
(I stand somewhat corrected – there was more green house gasses AND oxygen during the age of the dinosaurs and huge tropical forests)
Oh, that’s rich.
“Steve Sailor [sic] is snarking about Obama’s obsession with race!”
Obsession is another word for well-informed. Studying up on a subject enables one to rattle off facts, while ignorance forces one to point fingers and psychoanalyze.
Just because Obama’s views were held by demonrats before Obama rose to power doesn’t AUTOMATICALLY disprove D’Souza’s thesis.
Obama has his own motivations.