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Heather Mac Donald writes:
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.
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who is Mac Donald?
Freedomrings:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heather_Mac_Donald
Seems to be a reasonable Conservative unlike D’Souza who is taken apart in her article.
It is just soooo much easier to write an article when all you have to do is wake up from your “fever dream of paranoia and irrationality” and start typing. No thinking needed, just transcribing from your own dark and fearful mind. The troubling part is that so many Americans think that this kind of “pulled from my butthole” commentary is just great.
And Mac Donald is utterly fearless on race and Political Correctness issues, so she can’t be accused of truckling to the left here.
D’Souza also blamed 9/11 on Liberal culture
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/video/46901/
He is a true ass clown.
Obama is much more his mother’s work of art than his absent father’s. His maternal grandparents had much more to form Obama than Barack Sr.
I guess we can now place Heather MacDonald into the list of pseudo-Conservative hand-wringers and RINOs who lack the balls or the conviction to call Obama what he is.
Her womanly, hysterical screed completely misses the point: Obama’s philosophies are directly linked to those of his anti-colonialist, socialist, black, African father. There’s NO denying that since Obama told us as much in his books.
One is left to wonder WHY Heather MacDonald has had such a hysterical reaction to D’Souza’s well argued article?
Naturally, the truly clueless on this board (“easton”, “rabiner”) agree with her. Too funny!
Hey, easton:
Here’s a clue: 9/11 was a DIRECT result of Liberal philosophy and culture. It’s called “appeasement”, and for 8 years under Clinton (and 4 under Carter), we appeased Islamic loonies, and we’re paying the price.
In much the same way, we’ve been appeasing Chinese loonies for a LONG time now…And soon, we’ll be paying that price.
GEValle:
“Obama’s philosophies are directly linked to those of his anti-colonialist, socialist, black, African father. There’s NO denying that since Obama told us as much in his books.”
Really? You obviously haven’t read Obama’s books.
GEValle:
Didn’t the “appeasement” you see begin with Reagan and his lack of response to the killing of 241 of our servicemen in Lebanon in 1983?
D’Souza probably succeeds in feeding the paranoia and delusions of the Obama haters.
seeker656, Reagan’s “lack of response” for the Beirut barracks bombing may have been bad judgement, but it wasn’t appeasement. A good example of appeasement was Iran-Contra.
Carter got called weak for not getting his hostages back, even though he authorized a military rescue mission (aborted by sandstorm) and gave up nothing much but Warren Christopher’s time. All of THOSE hostages were released 5 minutes into Reagan’s Presidency, and only liberal conspiracy theorists assert Reagan had anything to do with that release, arguing that he delayed it until he was in office (I doubt that, myself). Reagan, on the other hand, appeased the terrorists with missiles–not once but repeatedly–even after they captured additional hostages to replace some of the ones already caught and released.
See, that’sappeasement.
GEVille:
“I guess we can now place Heather MacDonald into the list of pseudo-Conservative hand-wringers and RINOs who lack the balls or the conviction to call Obama what he is.”
I guess logic and reason are not 2 characteristics you cherish as a ‘real’ conservative. Only pseudo-conservatives can use their brains. Heather MacDonald clearly uses evidence to disprove the assertions made by D’Souza.
Not really hard to attack D’Souza’s hit piece. I actually think Mr. D’Souza needs to get out more and meet more people. If he needs some convoluted psychological insight, then would this be appropriate for Hillary? (The original McGovern girl), Bill, VP Biden or any standard issue Democrat? No, worldview explains a lot, maybe too much thinking by D’Souza who really seems to have racial hangups.
No one familiar with Heather MacDonald could reasonably call her a RINO. I highly doubt City Journal or Secular Right would accept her contributions if she were anything less than a limited-government conservative. And kudos to those on this post who’ve pointed out her courageous– and usually victorious– battles against the PC enormities of the academy. It is surely more than the Palin-Levin-Beck Creepshow has ever done for campus conservatives– for any conservatives, really. (And yes, as the term Secular Right implies, she’s a non-believer, like that site’s other contributors. No doubt her religous beliefs do not endear her to the christianists firmly in control of today’s conservative movement.)
What’s truly sad about all this is Dinesh D’Souza’s intellectual decline. Once upon a time, he was one of the best and brightest of campus conservatism; he helped launch a very formidable conservative movement at Dartmouth. He’s also written some intelligent things about slavery and patriotism, among other topics. But he’s sold out to the paranoiacs and racists now, apparently.
GEValle: was Bill Clinton “appeasing Islamic loonies” when he ordered airstrikes against that aspirin factory in the Sudan (misguided as that was)? Or when he ordered airstrikes against Iraq for violating the airspace in its southern no-fly zone?
The spirit of the John Birch Society, the pathology described in Richard Hofstadter’s “Paranoid Style,” is apparently back in a big, big way. I mean, just look at the enormous number of people on the American Right today who make Noam Chomsky look reasonable by comparison. Scary times.
(And also, GEValle, do you consider Bill Clinton’s decision to send combat troops into the Balkans– to save Muslims from genocide– “appealing Islamic loonies”? Just curious if you’re as cynical as you seem.)