You ever wonder what makes Obama tick? Is he employing Cloward/Piven or is he just an economic illiterate? Why all the apology tours, and other foreign policy peculiarities – what drives the decisions he makes?
This recent piece, How Obama Thinks, by Dinesh D’Souza, strives to answer those questions. D’Souza, who is a native of Mumbai, India, thinks he understands the third world mindset behind Obama’s anti-business, anti-American policies, which he enumerates, here:
Obama runs up taxpayer debt not in the billions but in the trillions. He has expanded the federal government’s control over home mortgages, investment banking, health care, autos and energy. The Weekly Standard summarizes Obama’s approach as omnipotence at home, impotence abroad.
The President’s actions are so bizarre that they mystify his critics and supporters alike. Consider this headline from the Aug. 18, 2009 issue of the Wall Street Journal: “Obama Underwrites Offshore Drilling.” Did you read that correctly? You did. The Administration supports offshore drilling–but drilling off the shores of Brazil. With Obama’s backing, the U.S. Export-Import Bank offered $2 billion in loans and guarantees to Brazil’s state-owned oil company Petrobras to finance exploration in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro–not so the oil ends up in the U.S. He is funding Brazilian exploration so that the oil can stay in Brazil.
Graphic via Stirring Trouble Internationally
More strange behavior: Obama’s June 15, 2010 speech in response to the Gulf oil spill focused not on cleanup strategies but rather on the fact that Americans “consume more than 20% of the world’s oil but have less than 2% of the world’s resources.” Obama railed on about “America’s century-long addiction to fossil fuels.” What does any of this have to do with the oil spill? Would the calamity have been less of a problem if America consumed a mere 10% of the world’s resources?
Graphic via Barack Obama’s Oil Spill’s Blog
The oddities go on and on. Obama’s Administration has declared that even banks that want to repay their bailout money may be refused permission to do so. Only after the Obama team cleared a bank through the Fed’s “stress test” was it eligible to give taxpayers their money back. Even then, declared Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, the Administration might force banks to keep the money.
The President continues to push for stimulus even though hundreds of billions of dollars in such funds seem to have done little. The unemployment rate when Obama took office in January 2009 was 7.7%; now it is 9.5%. Yet he wants to spend even more and is determined to foist the entire bill on Americans making $250,000 a year or more. The rich, Obama insists, aren’t paying their “fair share.” This by itself seems odd given that the top 1% of Americans pay 40% of all federal income taxes; the next 9% of income earners pay another 30%. So the top 10% pays 70% of the taxes; the bottom 40% pays close to nothing. This does indeed seem unfair–to the rich.
Graphic via The BS Report
Obama’s foreign policy is no less strange. He supports a $100 million mosque scheduled to be built near the site where terrorists in the name of Islam brought down the World Trade Center. Obama’s rationale, that “our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable,” seems utterly irrelevant to the issue of why the proposed Cordoba House should be constructed at Ground Zero.
Photo from NYC 9/11 rally via Eye On The World
Recently the London Times reported that the Obama Administration supported the conditional release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber convicted in connection with the deaths of 270 people, mostly Americans. This was an eye-opener because when Scotland released Megrahi from prison and sent him home to Libya in August 2009, the Obama Administration publicly and appropriately complained. The Times, however, obtained a letter the Obama Administration sent to Scotland a week before the event in which it said that releasing Megrahi on “compassionate grounds” was acceptable as long as he was kept in Scotland and would be “far preferable” to sending him back to Libya. Scottish officials interpreted this to mean that U.S. objections to Megrahi’s release were “half-hearted.” They released him to his home country, where he lives today as a free man.
Graphic via Rush Limbaugh.com
One more anomaly: A few months ago nasa Chief Charles Bolden announced that from now on the primary mission of America’s space agency would be to improve relations with the Muslim world. Come again? Bolden said he got the word directly from the President. “He wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science and math and engineering.” Bolden added that the International Space Station was a model for nasa’s future, since it was not just a U.S. operation but included the Russians and the Chinese. Obama’s redirection of the agency caused consternation among former astronauts like Neil Armstrong and John Glenn, and even among the President’s supporters: Most people think of nasa’s job as one of landing on the moon and Mars and exploring other faraway destinations. Sure, we are for Islamic self-esteem, but what on earth was Obama up to here?
Photo via The 9/12 march on Washington
Theories abound to explain the President’s goals and actions. Critics in the business community–including some Obama voters who now have buyer’s remorse–tend to focus on two main themes. The first is that Obama is clueless about business. The second is that Obama is a socialist–not an out-and-out Marxist, but something of a European-style socialist, with a penchant for leveling and government redistribution.
These theories aren’t wrong so much as they are inadequate. Even if they could account for Obama’s domestic policy, they cannot explain his foreign policy. The real problem with Obama is worse–much worse.
Keep reading.
D’Souza posits that Obama, profoundly influenced by his father, is an anti-colonialist, making a convincing case that he thinks best explains Obama’s anti-American views.
Newt Gingrich, concurred, telling NRO that D’Souza’s analysis is 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.”
***
“I think Obama gets up every morning with a worldview that is fundamentally wrong about reality,” Gingrich says. “If you look at the continuous denial of reality, there has got to be a point where someone stands up and says that this is just factually insane.”
When ABC’s George Stephanopoulos asked WH spokesman Robert Gibbs to comment on Gingrich’s view that ”Obama’s ‘Kenyan, Anti-Colonial’ Worldview Rules America”, he responded by saying that Gingrich is “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.”
Not at all surprising that Gibbs would somehow work birtherism into the issue, since painting all Republicans as birthers is part of the 2010/2012 WH election strategy. But I suspect, despite his claims to the contrary, that he does have a pretty good idea what Gingrich is talking about – which begs the question, why are so many Democrats going along with it?
UPDATE:
Gibbs is now pushing back on Twitter:
RELATED:
GOP.Gov: President Obama’s Foreign Policy: Bewildered on Human Rights and Engaging Oppressors
See also:
Baldilocks: Origin of the Nightmare
There is a good reason that many Africans of that generation–educated in Europe and America–are socialists, aside from the desire to repudiate the capitalism to which most of the hated European colonial masters subscribed. They were actively indoctrinated.
Most readers know that my origin and life circumstances are a mirror image of the president’s—some things are frighteningly similar; others radically dissimilar in obvious areas. However, for continuity’s sake, here it is again: courtesy of the Mboya Airlift, our Kenyan Luo fathers arrived in America in 1959 to receive an American education, married and produced children with American women, divorced them, and, upon graduation, returned to their homeland.
Both of us were partially raised by the generation prior to that of our parents–in his case, his maternal grandparents; in my case, my maternal grandmother’s sister and her husband.
When Philip Ochieng and Barack Obama, Sr. arrived in America, their mentors were people like radical Progressives Cora and Peter Weiss, who—via the innocuously coined African American Student Foundation– funded much of the tuition, travel, care and feeding of the Kenyan students selected for the Airlift. (My mother says that when she and my father were in college, their non-African–read: white–social circle included nothing but communists and socialists.)
And herein lies a crucial difference as to the reason that my life turned out differently than Obama’s: both of our biological fathers are socialists and atheists. However, in Obama’s case, his mother’s immediate family consisted of socialists and atheists as well. Mine does not.
Read it all.
Hat tip: Lucianne
