Quick note. For those who were as disgusted as I was about the recent hack racist smear job on President Obama written by Dinesh D'Souza for Forbes, blogger Heather MacDonald (a conservative I should point out) eviscerates Mr. D'Souza in a new column at Secular Right. I highly recommend reading it! Money quote (emphasis mine):
"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."
"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."
That last sentence is the key.
2 comments:
I can appreciate the fact that people can take that story to be either insightful or political butchery, but I still do not get why you think it was racist, Splash.
Nothing D'Souza said was racist in denotation or conotation, sir. His descriptions were factual and not racially denigrating unless someone is actually looking for an excuse to be offended, sir.
His descriptions are factual? In what sense of the word? He completely makes up some political kinship between the supposed views of the president's dead father and the President who barely knew him. If you'd read Obama's first book, you would know that the only thing Obama took from his father was his name. Nothing else. It's the intellectual equivalent of saying that since Reagan's father was an alcoholic that Reagan's presidency is akin to being a drunk. It makes zero sense.
The racist element is trying to tie Obama's presidency to some African tribe. If you don't see how dismissing the President's 100% American personal story by claiming he is little more than a Luo tribesman is racist, then I'm not sure you understand the concept.
Regardless, the article is a factless, anti-intellectual screed written by someone who knows very little about the president, American politics, and the American people. D'Souza is an angry little man whose pettiness and poor intellect don't allow for complex thought or analysis. He writes like a teenage David Duke.
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