Many thanks to commentor El Cid for his link to the brilliant Economist smackdown of Dinesh D’Souza’s weird racialist “Obama Derangment Syndrome“:
I DON’T find it at all difficult to understand how Barack Obama thinks, because most of his beliefs are part of the broad consensus in America’s centre or centre-left: greenhouse-gas emissions reductions, universal health insurance, financial-reform legislation, repealing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, and so forth. Dinesh D’Souza, on the other hand, appears to have met so few Democrats in recent decades that he finds such views shocking, and thinks they can only be explained by the fact that Mr Obama’s father was a Kenyan government economist who pushed for a non-aligned stance in the Cold War during the 1960s-70s.
[…] __
Most Americans wouldn’t have a hard time answering the question of why the government ought to guarantee all kids a good education. “Because it’s not the kids’ fault that their parents aren’t rich PhD’s” pretty much covers it… So why would Mr D’Souza perform the moral contortionist’s act necessary to justify elitism in education as integral to a “free society”? Well, here’s an explanation modeled on the one Mr D’Souza provides for Mr Obama’s views:
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If Mr D’Souza grew up amongst a tiny hereditary elite desperately trying to protect its privileged status in a huge and bitterly poor third-world country, that would explain why he wants to make sure disadvantaged children are denied the educational opportunities his daughter receives.
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What about his weird instinct to dredge up the irrelevant topic of anti-colonialism in explaining Barack Obama’s run-of-the-mill center-left political agenda? Using the same phrasing:
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If Mr D’Souza hailed from a tiny Westernised elite that allied itself with the European colonialist project against the national independence movement of his own country, that would explain his monomania about anti-colonialism.
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It would, however, be unfair to explain Mr D’Souza’s views this way. First of all, I’m no expert on Indian history or the caste system in Goa, and the description above may be just as shallow a caricature as the one Mr D’Souza provides of post-colonial East African politics in his inflammatory article. Specifically, I know no more about Mr D’Souza’s family’s political views than he does about Barack Obama’s father’s (about which he appears to know strikingly little, given the wealth of information available on the subject)… [A]nybody who wants to know “how D’Souza thinks” is free to look up what he’s written in books and articles over the years, just as Mr D’Souza could criticise the views of Barack Obama by referring to things Mr Obama has said and done.
By all means, read the whole thing, because it’s very cheering to know that there are still a few sane people with access to the levers of Respectable Major Media Access.
MikeJ
Why racialist and not good old racist?
MikeJ
Why raçialist and not good old racist? I know. It was to trick us into moderation with boner pill names.
eric
this is in the dead tree edition too….
http://www.suntimes.com/news/steinberg/2701558,CST-NWS-stein13.article
sample:
“President Obama was seen in public without his wedding ring Friday, which the media felt compelled to note, though it couldn’t quite bring itself to fully ponder the two usual reasons a man does that.
Instead, it swallowed the weak White House explanation that the ring is being repaired.”
i cant tell if it is serious simply because I cannot believe any editor would go to print with this in the paper. I am moving to Kenya.
cleek
it’s amazing that D’Souza gets taken seriously anywhere – i mean, someone takes him seriously enough to think he’ll bring them readers and they give him money for this. that’s fucked up.
General Stuck
D’Souza is a creepy little rarified shit. I’d love to take him on the short tour of my stomping grounds in east Ky. And then drop the silver spoon fucker up the darkest holler I could find. Let him fight his way out, see how tough the caste raised wingnut really is.
El Cid
While meant as satirical exaggeration, it sure wouldn’t be the first time that a 3rd world nation’s ex-elites would adopt strongly racist and elitist attitudes and right wing affiliation in the US.
beltane
Dinesh D’Souza has taught me that I too am a Kenyan anti-colonialist. My friends and family-all Kenyan, and we never even knew it before. I think there was a Peter Tosh song about this, but I never really understood until D’Souza enlightened me.
jl
The link below has an amusing and educational analysis of D’Souza’s fantasy based rant:
Newt Gingrich’s dirty politics and Forbes’ awful article
http://www.thefourthbranch.com/newt-gingrichs-dirty-politics/
Found via Krugman’s post today:
Ex-Im Bonkers
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/13/ex-im-bonkers/
geg6
OT but tangentially related…
Fuckity fuckity fuck. Fat fucker Haley Barbour is seriously claiming that the GOP was the party that brought about civil rights in the South and that the incredibly brave kids who integrated Ol’ Miss were just like any other anonymous students once they got on campus. Unfuckingbelievable, but Digby has the story. If I could remember how to link, I would but go and read it for yourself. Fuck but this pisses me off.
El Cid
Also, FDR was openly anti-colonialist.
Clearly FDR was an inscrutable Kenyonesian plant.
Of course in reality these declared principles were not really supported, the US used most of the 20th century to ally to governments and forces around the world to prevent self-determination, but at least in the open it described the end of colonial domination as a good idea.
Thing was, though, these words had a much bigger effect than FDR or Churchill actually desired.
You see, in the 3rd world, they took these words seriously — they didn’t just think it was wartime propaganda to feed to the natives. Many of those leading the struggle for independence from European powers in, say, Africa, were veterans of WWII fighting for Britain and France, and they heard these stirring words, and they heard the constant denunciation of Nazi and Imperial Japanese tyranny. And they fought for, and gained, independence. They didn’t live happily ever after, but at least many gave it a shot.
Silver
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”
The message is the same, it’s just that this time they found a brown guy to do it.
El Cid
@geg6: Ronald Reagan, death camp liberating hero.
Fiction, reality — the right makes its own reality. Whatever. Hey, Newt Gingrich probably led the D-Day landings when Americans fought the Obama forces.
handy
Better not read the comments to the linked article, gentle BJers. Some take issue with the idea that Obama is centrist-liberal, let alone left. One even goes so far as to call him a “Reagan Republican.” Clutch your pearls tightly and don’t say no one warned you.
bkny
hardball had a very good first segment on this tonite; newt, et al, have taken obama’s story, which exemplifies the best and hope of america, and turned it on its head to he’s ‘the other’, the cypher thru which his ghost father fights the white oppressor. it’s definitely worth checking out; matthews is getting increasingly outspoken against the gop tactics.
El Cid
@handy: Under no stretch of any sane imagination could Obama be classified as “left”.
Warren Terra
@eric:
That’s hilarious. The implication is that US President Barack Obama is taking off his wedding ring for the usual reason … i.e. to deceive women he’s trying to pick up into thinking he’s not actually a married man? Because Obama is free to go trolling in bars, and because he’s going to meet someone who won’t recognize him an know his marital status? WTF?
@geg6:
Well, Robert Byrd was in the KKK in 1948, so Haley Barbour’s probably telling the truth.
My favorite version of this recent attempt by Republicans to claim they were the true party of Civil Rights is when they say that the sincerity of Strom Thurmond’s reformation and rebirth as a non-racist can be proven by his decision to leave the Democrats, the party of repression, and join the Republicans. See, it all works as long as you have already made your judgment and are cool with circular reasoning.
ChrisNYC
@El Cid: Yes! That’s the heartbreaker (but also the vindication of the worth of the ideas, I suppose).
From reading your comments, I think you know loads about this stuff but — I’ll recount a tidbit that I love anyway. In The Best and the Brightest, Halberstam says that FDR, weeks before his death, told an aide that he was “worried about the brown people” in the post-WWII shake out. He said the US didn’t need 1 billion enemies. He wanted to make sure the French were forced to accept a plan to give independence to the Vietnamese. Instead, he died and Britain ceded to France the right to go back into Vietnam when the Japanese left and then…Dien Bien Phu and the rest. Meanwhile Ho Chi Minh was having his soldiers recite the Declaration of Independence and writing letters to Eisenhower saying, “We don’t need to align with China. We’ll happily join you all in the whole capitalism thing. We just want to run our own affairs.” Ugh.
El Cid
@Warren Terra: Well, Thurmond also had enlightened views on interracial birthing.
El Cid
@ChrisNYC: With the exception of Nixon and Reagan, I don’t think US Presidents choosing counter-insurgency over independence etc. were mustache twirling villains and often indicated in their papers (you can read the declassified record of US foreign policy in the official Foreign Relations of the United States) that in an ideal world they would have preferred more freedom and democracy for 3rd world regions — it just always happened that something else had a higher priority or that the people likely to lead were unacceptable to US policy.
If what you’re looking at are the inner thoughts of Presidents, then those sorts of sentiments are important. If you’re looking at what the logical explanations are for US policy motivations, you have to be careful about using how you listen to politicians explain their policy views. Most everyone wants to think they’re doing the right thing.
ChrisNYC
@El Cid: I see. And I didn’t mean to suggest that FDR was right thinking or that, had he lived, all would have been resolved in Vietnam. I think my comment was going in two, inconsistent directions.
The heartbreaker is the rhetoric vs. the reality — and the earnest belief in the rhetoric and plain reason (“look US, your own country was created through grabbing self determination — you should LIKE that”). That, I think, is demonstrated in the Vietnam history. But then, I love the FDR story, so I wedged it in.
El Cid
@ChrisNYC: I wasn’t disagreeing so much as noting how frustrating it is that so many leaders do seem to feel an impulse to go down a path which likely would have been better for us all, and then it just doesn’t happen. And yes, I think a lot of times when leaders during WWII were talking democracy and self-determination they meant it, even if they really didn’t think deeply about what this might mean for Africa or Asia or if they thought it would take 100 years or so to get them there.
Loneoak
D’Souza came to my undergrad alma matter on one of those Koch funded College Republican ‘speaking’ tours. I asked him a polite question and he proceeded to mock me and never once came close to answering the question. All the pasty virgins in the front row snickered. That’s when I realized they aren’t even worth talking to, only mocking.
Brachiator
@ChrisNYC:
This sounds like the same kind of unconvincing revisionism that had JFK just short of proposing a total withdrawal from Vietnam prior to his assassination. There is something too American-centric about this assertion.
Vietnam looms large to us today, but I just don’t see that it was seen as that big a deal to FDR in 1945. And the allies sought a return of the status quo for all its imperial possessions. For the French, this meant not only Vietnam but also Algeria and other possessions. For the British, India was still considered to be the jewel in the Crown, and Churchill was totally blind to the contradiction of having colonial troops fight for the honor of restoring a crumbling empire.
I wonder if FDR had any thoughts about the possibility of independence of the Philippines?
ruemara
Great article but boy, some of the ones posted above chapped my ass. Fired off a letter to that ring writer. What can I say? Some of these guys shouldn’t be ground up for chum. Even sharks have standards.
El Cid
@Brachiator: Churchill immediately reinterpreted the Atlantic Charter for only applying the principles of self-determination for colonies of German control. Tanganyika, Rwanda-Burundi, SW Africa, etc.
handy
@El Cid:
I’m just tweakin’ is all :)
wag
@El Cid:
Fixed!
El Cid
@wag: Newt was inspired by the story of how Glenn Beck led US forces to victory in the War of 1812 Against Soshullist Obamacare.
wag
@El Cid:
… and Sarah Palin sewed the first “Don’t Tread on Me” flag.
catclub
@geg6:
Haley Barbour pretends it was all fine by the time his enlightened generation of conservatives went to college.
Ask him when his fraternity at Old Miss was integrated ( and make sure to demand pictures of the members).
jl
@El Cid: Newt was inspired by how much cash Beck and Palin are raking in. And Beck is in thick with some friendly folks with a gazillion in pure honest to God GOLD TREASURE!
Newt is thinking business, here.
It’s just business. The genius of political capitalism.
arguingwithsignposts
@cleek:
c.f. Megan McArdle, Bill Kristol, etc., etc. ad nauseum.
No pundit ever gets kicked to the curb for being wrong.
Jay C
@Brachiator:
Probably not a lot, since Philippine independence had already been agreed upon since early in his term. And happened, despite the disruptions of the, pretty much right on schedule.
Linda Featheringill
@eric:
Obama and the wedding ring:
Stories pop up now and then claiming there is some hanky panky going on.
But whatever the truth is, Obama does not run around unattended. He might be the most attended person in the country.
So those reports/rumors are just plain silly.
El Cid
@Linda Featheringill: The wedding ring is a storage device for all our national security information and it is regularly exchanged with Luo agents.
Brachiator
@El Cid:
Yeah, but as I noted, he was obviously blind to the coming storm. The American civil rights movement was energized by the outcome of WWII, as were liberation movements around the world. It soon became clear that you could not ask people to fight for democracy and then ask that they quietly return to their old roles in the empire (and during WW I, Britain and the US both went out of their way to limit the participation of nonwhites. France, oddly enough, deployed over 200,000 Africans from its colonies in various operations in Europe, Africa and Mesopotamia).
A recent issue of BBC History Magazine had an illuminating article on Britain’s appeal to the Empire to join the fight against Germany and Japan.
And in the US, I have to think that dumbass white racists tried to keep blacks out of combat roles in part because they realized that you could not ask people to risk their lives for their country and insist on the wisdom of Jim Crow and second class citizenship.
This was indeed good stuff. It was also illuminating to see most of the comments taking D’Souza to the woodshed, clearly failing to fall for the nonsense he is peddling.
Mark S.
Who on earth doesn’t know Obama is married?
Roger Moore
@Warren Terra:
Maybe it’s because he and Michelle are on the outs right now, and taking of the wedding ring is a sign that their marriage is on the rocks. But the key thing is that you can’t go bringing a bunch of facts and reasoning into the issue, or people who want to engage in lies and innuendo will be out of business in no time. And you wouldn’t want the corpse of the right wing media on your conscience, would you?
Brachiator
@Jay C:
RE: I wonder if FDR had any thoughts about the possibility of independence of the Philippines?
I take your point, although it is noteworthy that “right on schedule” apparently did not lead FDR to reconsider this aspect of the Tydings–McDuffie Act:
El Cid
@Roger Moore: Remember how the librul medja ignored all those dependable reports of how Hillary was having all these wild lesbian affairs while she was planning how to carry out a Russian-UN invasion?
Mike G
@arguingwithsignposts:
They should be more accurately thought of as storytellers.
It would be absurd to fire a storyteller for saying something that isn’t true, because that isn’t part of their function. The storyteller’s job is to tell comforting stories, the more fantastical, entertaining and flattering to the listener the better.
burnspbesq
@geg6:
Gene Robinson dismantled Barbour’s faulty memory about the 1960s on Rachel’s show about 10 days ago. Twas a hoot.
Mnemosyne
I realize that the president is probably much more organized and together than my moderately ADHD self, but is it completely impossible that the man just forgot to put his ring on that morning?
I really don’t understand what the point would be of taking off your ring as a sign the marriage is in trouble when you’re still living in the same house.
mai naem
I detest these Indian American and Oxbridge conservative pundits who come to the US and make a killing off what the United States was exactly formed to be against. Furthermore, they exaggerate their accents by pretending to be Bill Buckley. Ugh. Go. Away.
Ravi J
As an Indian immigrant in US, I find Dinesh D’Souza and Ramesh Ponnuru absolutely infuriating, and humiliating to what we are. These guys are insane.
Zuzu's Petals
I notice D’Souza starts his Frobes piece with an outright lie:
A lie that was disproven months ago (warning:Politico link):
debbie
Why aren’t Progressives/Democrats standing up and screaming about this kind of thing being the real class warfare? This is the kind of thing that ought to be a nationwide MoveOn.org campaign, complete with tv commercials with scary announcers.
Lurking Canadian
it couldn’t quite bring itself to fully ponder the two usual reasons a man does that
Usually if I’m going around without my wedding ring it means one of two things:
1) I couldn’t remember where I left it last night and I was late for work
2) I don’t want it to get caught in the tablesaw.
Do you think these are the two reasons they’re talking about? The Secret Service wouldn’t let the President use a tablesaw, would they?
Colin Laney
If Mr D’Souza hailed from a tiny Westernised elite that allied itself with the European colonialist project against the national independence movement of his own country, that would explain his monomania about anti-colonialism.
Anyone remember the D’Souzas in Kipling’s Kim? Kim meets them at the boarding school for wealthy Eurasian boys.
JZ
My right wing father-in-law surely just canceled his subscription to the Economist.
debbie
@ Linda Featheringill:
Obama and his wedding ring are just another smear, but unfortunately, there is precedent for the president being able to get up to mischief with, for example, a young intern. Sadly, that’s all it’ll ever take to start and maintain a rumor like this. I’d even bet it’ll never go away. Plenty of precedent for that, too.