Understanding Obama: One Author’s View
Friday, September 21, 2012 at 9:09 AM 
There have been many times during Obama’s first term that, as a freedom-loving, red, white and blue-blooded American Conservative, I could not understand what motivated Barrack Obama. The 2012 campaign has exposed more about Obama than the 2008 race. Like former Governor Romney we don’t believe there is much that can be done to sway Obama supporters from the “dark side” (Star Wars reference). Here is an opinion piece from the New York Yimes' Stanley Fish thathelps put Obama's motives into greater focus.
Obama, D’Souza and Anti-Colonialism
By STANLEY FISH, New York Times Opinion Pages
I’ve never before had the experience of seeing a movie based on the ideas of a friend who is also the film’s producer, writer, co-director and on-camera star. The friend is Dinesh D’Souza and the movie is “2016: Obama’s America.” It’s a bit less than 90 minutes long and for the most part it follows the path of D’Souza’s 2010 book “The Roots of Obama’s Rage.”
That path is at once psychological and historical. D’Souza tells us that he wants to understand Obama’s actions, which do not, he contends, follow either from the American dream of the founding fathers or from the civil rights story of Selma, Birmingham, Brown v. Board of Education and Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. Instead, according to D’Souza, the dream Obama is intent on realizing is the dream of his anti-colonialist father, Barack Obama Sr., whose influence on his son’s life is, perhaps paradoxically, all the greater because he was absent; the two met only once, when the future president was 10 years old.
Anti-colonialism, as D’Souza defines it, is underwritten by a conviction that “colonialism is a system of piracy in which the wealth of the colonized countries is systematically stolen by the colonizers” and that at the present time the United States, originally a colony itself, is the chief neo-colonial power, continuing its flawed history of subjugating native Americans, Mexicans, Hawaii and the Philippines into the 21st century. “My argument,” says D’Souza in “The Roots of Obama’s Rage,” “is that it is the anti-colonial ideology of his African father that Barack Obama took to heart.” Once we understand that ideology — once we really know Obama — we will understand a set of policies that, under any other explanatory model, seem contradictory and disunified. >>Continued
Basil Ryan | in 2012 General Election, Obama | Share Article Permalink | Email Article | Comments Off | Print Article 
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