Dinesh D'Souza Unmasks the Real Obama

September 14, 2010 Topic: The Presidency Region: United States Blog Brand: Jacob Heilbrunn

Dinesh D'Souza Unmasks the Real Obama

Newt Gingrich and Dinesh D'Souza team up to prove President Obama's "Kenyan," "socialist," and "anti-colonialist" past still haunts him.

America is fighting the colonial war again, but it isn't about England. Instead, it's about President Obama. After Newt Gingrich speculated that Obama's actions could be predicted on the basis of his Kenyan, anti-colonialist background, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs fired back,

He's trying to appeal to the fringe of people that don't believe the president was born in this country. You would normally expect better from somebody who had held the position of Speaker of the House.

You would? Newt's always had a penchant for diving into history and Gibbs' huffing and puffing can't really avoid the fact that Obama's past remains a subject of controversy, whether the White House likes it or not (which it clearly doesn't). The basis of the latest ruckus is a cover story in Forbes by Dinesh D'Souza. Barack Obama might appear to be a fairly conventional Democrat, at least in his political views, as the Economist notes in lambasting D'Souza. But D'Souza, in an article being cited by, among others Gingrich, proclaims that he has discovered a far more dangerous and insidious Obama. In a sprawling essay, D'Souza dismisses the notion that Obama is a European-style socialist as inadequate. Instead, he asserts that Obama could hardly pose a more dangerous threat to the American creed because he embodies a crusade against the West that was championed by various Third World anti-colonial thinkers, most prominent among them his father.

According to D'Souza,

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.

Who knew?

Actually, D'Souza's approach isn't as new as he would like to think. Jerome Corsi went down this path in his book Obamanation in the summer of 2008. But now D'Souza has done a little more digging to uncover what appear to be terrifying facts about Obama. It seems that his father authored an article in 1965 in which he suggested that tax rates could rise as high as 100% and that Kenyans should shrink from no measures to rid themselves of the British. To be sure, Obama only met his father twice, the last time when he was ten-years-old. But D'Souza speculates that a kind of act of transubstantiation took place when Obama visited his father's grave.

Here is D'Souza:

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.

Eugene Robinson refers to D'Douza's essay as "gibberish" and "claptrap." But D'Souza has a track record that means he has to be taken seriously. After all, his last big book was The Enemy At Home, showing that the American left was actually reponsible for 9/11 by triggering rage among pious Muslims against America. Muslims were to some extent legitimately aggrieved, D'Souza indicated, because Hollywood exports decadent movies and loose sexual mores to the rest of the world.

With brilliant insights like that, it would be a daring critic indeed who would dispute D'Souza's latest findings.

(Photo by ajagendorf25)