What Were You Thinking?

How Obama Thinks (Forbes Magazine)

2010-09-16T11:39:00.003-04:00

From Forbes Magazine comes this insightful analysis of the policies of Barack Hussein Obama, by Dinesh D'Souza. A couple of paragraphs will give you the flavor, but read the entire article.

Barack Obama is the most antibusiness president in a generation, perhaps in American history. Thanks to him the era of big government is back. 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 Standardsummarizes Obama's approach as omnipotence at home, impotence abroad.

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. But we have been blinded to his real agenda because, across the political spectrum, we all seek to fit him into some version of American history. In the process, we ignore Obama's own history.

It may seem incredible to suggest that the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United States. That is what I am saying. From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America's military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father's position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America. In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America's power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe's resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet.

Rejecting the socialist formula, Obama has shown no intention to nationalize the investment banks or the health sector. Rather, he seeks to decolonize these institutions, and this means bringing them under the government's leash. That's why Obama retains the right to refuse bailout paybacks--so that he can maintain his control. 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.

Obama supports the Ground Zero mosque because to him 9/11 is the event that unleashed the American bogey and pushed us into Iraq and Afghanistan. He views some of the Muslims who are fighting against America abroad as resisters of U.S. imperialism. Certainly that is the way the Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi portrayed himself at his trial. Obama's perception of him as an anticolonial resister would explain why he gave tacit approval for this murderer of hundreds of Americans to be released from captivity.

Clearly the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. goes a long way to explain the actions and policies of his son in the Oval Office. And we can be doubly sure about his father's influence because those who know Obama well testify to it. His "granny" Sarah Obama (not his real grandmother but one of his grandfather's other wives) told Newsweek, "I look at him and I see all the same things--he has taken everything from his father. The son is realizing everything the father wanted. The dreams of the father are still alive in the son."

In his own writings Obama stresses the centrality of his father not only to his beliefs and values but to his very identity. He calls his memoir "the record of a personal, interior journey--a boy's search for his father and through that search a workable meaning for his life as a black American." And again, "It was into my father's image, the black man, son of Africa, that I'd packed all the attributes I sought in myself." Even though his father was absent for virtually all his life, Obama writes, "My father's voice had nevertheless remained untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval. You do not work hard enough, Barry. You must help in your people's struggle. Wake up, black man!"

Colonialism today is a dead issue. No one cares about it except the man in the White House. He is the last anticolonial. Emerging market economies such as China, India, Chile and Indonesia have solved the problem of backwardness; they are exploiting their labor advantage and growing much faster than the U.S. If America is going to remain on top, we have to compete in an increasingly tough environment.

But instead of readying us for the challenge, 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.

Dinesh D'Souza is president of the King's College in New York City

What Were You Thinking?

Who is this guy?

2010-08-30T14:40:00.002-04:00

Peggy Noonan raises the questions that most Americans have already been pondering in their own minds for the past couple of years. A quote from her column, dated August 27, 2010:

When the American people have looked at the presidents of the past few decades they could always sort of say, "I know that guy." Bill Clinton: Southern governor. Good ol' boy, drawlin', flirtin', got himself a Fulbright. "I know that guy." George W. Bush: Texan, little rough around the edges, good family, youthful high jinks, stopped drinking, got serious. "I know that guy." Ronald Reagan was harder to peg, but you still knew him: small-town Midwesterner, moved on and up, serious about politics, humorous, patriotic. "I know that guy." Barack Obama? Sleek, cerebral, detached, an academic from Chicago by way of Hawaii and Indonesia. "You know what? I don't know that guy!"

Who among us can say that they really have an understanding of who he is, what he thinks, where he comes from?

What Were You Thinking?

Transparency? You decide...

2010-03-16T12:32:00.001-04:00

The Failure of Liberal Governance

2010-02-17T10:53:00.002-05:00

From the Wall Street Journal today:

To fix the economy, Democrats sent federal spending to peacetime heights in the name of replacing private investment with "public demand." But instead of spurring recovery, this spending spree has retarded it by frightening the public and business about future tax increases and the rising burden of public debt. The new jobs Democrats promised still haven't arrived, and while the recovery should finally produce job growth this year, Americans know they have received little for their $862 billion in "stimulus."

The rest of Mr. Obama's liberal agenda has foundered on its own overreaching implausibility. To fight the speculative threat of global warming, Democrats have tried to impose vast new taxes to raise energy prices. To address rising health-care costs, they proposed huge new health subsidies and political control of medical decisions. Medicare is heading toward bankruptcy, yet Mr. Obama's response is to make the entire health-care system like Medicare. And to fix the financial system, they have declared war on bankers while proposing reforms that would do little to prevent future bank bailouts.

Read the entire article here.

What Were You Thinking?

Awaken, O America

2010-02-09T11:20:00.000-05:00

The Obama Disconnect

2010-01-18T12:28:00.004-05:00

Peggy Noonan points out the disconnect between our current president and the people of the country. It's not just a rhetorical disconnect, not just an iconic disconnect. No, these reflect a deeper disconnect, the truly problematic one, and that is over policy. Read the article here.

What Were You Thinking?

How Obama Thinks (Forbes Magazine)

Who is this guy?

Transparency? You decide...

The Failure of Liberal Governance

Awaken, O America

The Obama Disconnect

Criminal Activity or Terrorism

Obama and Post-Modern Rascism

Smarter Security, not More Money

Tiger and Barack

Hentoff: America under Obama

An Overdue Debunking

Attack on America Redux

American History, as mis-told by Harry Reid

Mr Independant

Lincoln's Thanksgiving Proclamation

Mindless Mantra of "Diversity"

The Winds of Change

Reagan's Role

November 7, 2009: a Day that will Live in Infamy

WSJ on ObamaCare

'Obama Is Average'

Pay Cuts!

Black Scholars speak to Our Times

Cash for ... Golf Carts?

Obamacare and Abortion

The Cost of Health-care Reform 2 & 3

The Baucus Bill

The Cost of Health-care Reform

Global Climate Change

The Role of Mothers in Society

Busy, Busy, Busy!

Medicare and Gag Orders

Economic Vandalism

Medicare for All?

The President's Promises

Are we indeed Ignorant?

Whose Decision?

Lloyd Marcus, American

"Government Can Fix It"

Cancer Treatment or Assisted Suicide?

Health-Care Secrets

Dick Morris on Joe Lieberman

Read the Bill!!

Obama's Summer of Discontent

Voter Intimidation

Death by Bureaucratic Fiat.

Democrat's Worst Nightmare

What Does HR 3200 Actually Say?

Support for Health Care Reform

Disaster in the Making

Peggy Noonan on Common Sense

Obama's Empty MedPac Promise

Time to Quit Digging

Does Ted Kennedy deserve his extended cancer care?

Obama Admits He's "Not Familiar" With House Bill

Their Own Medicine

New Ad from www.OurCountryPAC.org

Rep Grayson to IG Coleman: I am Shocked!

We The People Stimulus Plan

A Tangled Web, Part II

A Tangled Web

Our Judeo-Christian Nation

8 GOP Votes Paved Way for "Cap And Tax" Bill

The Market Driven Church

Judicial Activism

Out of Context, Part III

"We're Sorry..."

Free Health Care

Out of Context, Part II

Out of Context

Five Character Flaws...

'Empathy' In Action

Presidential Oath of Office

Sotomayor: Judges make Policy

Oath of Office for Federal Judges

Waxman-Markey

Chicago Tribune cartoon - 1934

Lest We Forget...