This book (Regnery 2010) was touted on Fox News by Newt Gingrich as being "the most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Barack Obama." Newt also said that the paradigm of postcolonialism is the only rubric through which Obama makes perfect sense. I ordered it.
The thesis of the book is that Barack Obama's "change," isn't random, but that he has a clear sense of what is, and what should be, and every waking moment is spent moving us from one state to the other.
This state of what ought to be was defined by Obama's father, Obama Senior.
D'Souza points to myriad records in Obama Sr. and Obama Jr.'s thinking that show the parallel. He also points out that Stanley (Obama's mother) was Obama Sr.'s faithful disciple even decades after their divorce and spent Obama Jr's formative years proselytizing the child under her care with her ex-husband's viewpoint. She herself now has a book published by Duke University Press that reveals how completely colonized she was by Obama Senior's postcolonial thinking.
What IS postcolonialism? It is the notion that the western powers gained their wealth by fraudulently skimming the wealth of the third world and keeping them in an adolescent state so that they could be pillaged at will. Postcolonialism argues that it is time for the third world to grow in stature, so that countries like India can take their rightful place on the UN Security Council, for instance.
Another book that I've picked up on Obama called Reading Obama by a Harvard Professor named Kloppenberg argues that Obama is a pragmatist along the lines of Richard Rorty and that his interventions are piecemeal and opportunistic (I haven't finished this book, but that's the sense of his argument that I've gleaned from browsing). What I don't understand about that perspective is what is the larger framework? To change from what is to what should be you have to have a clear map of what is and how it got to be that way versus what ought to be and how to get there. Without that, you can't operate.
D'Souza argues that American liberal capitalism (arising from Locke and Smith) is quite different from Obama's postcolonial conception.
Obama's viewpoint arises from the most important postcolonial theorist, Frantz Fanon, who also influenced his father.
Fanon writes, "The native is an oppressed person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor" (Fanon cited on p. 134).
To get into the seat of the persecutor, however, Obama has to seem pragmatic and like a reasonable person. He can't show his aggression. "Obama recognized that he had to deliver radical and even revolutionary themes in a bland, anodyne way so that they could cross the threshold of political acceptability. Here Obama knew that he would have to become the Translator, someone who could almost mechanically convert anti-colonial politics into a rhetoric that sounds harmless and even beneficial to the people who are the targets of that politics. This was not an easy challenge, yet Obama was entirely up to it" (142).
D'Souza continues, "The approach that Obama developed is really quite simple. On a given issue, Obama begins by contrasting two extreme positions, and then he presents his view as the rational and middle of the road solution, even if there is nothing rational or middle-of-the-road about it. For instance, if Obama wants to argue for confiscatory taxes, he insists that there are some in society who don't think the rich should pay any taxes at all. There are others who say that the rich should give up all their income in taxes. Obama, ever the mediator of these differences, then declares that he will settle for the rich paying their fair share -- say 40 or 50 percent. In this way Obama's outrageously high taxation comes to seem sensible against the backdrop of two extreme positions, even though no one really holds those positions" (142).
Against this redistribution, in which the first world gives to the third world, and the wealthy give to the poor, D'Souza's notion is something along the lines of the Little Red Hen. The ones who do the work should get to keep their bread, and eat it, too. In other words, those who won't work, should not eat, as St. Paul said.
But D'Souza's argument has more levels of implication. He argues that if America were to give up its power, then China would happily step into the place of super power, and the world would be far worse off with the Red Chinese calling the shots.
"And this is indeed one option, for those who are tired of American leadership in the world. But there is a second, for those who are not. We can give up on America or we can give up on this president..." (196).
Obama is currently trying to equalize the world by transferring American power and wealth so as to negate the envy and anger of the third world and to redistribute our leadership position to places like China.
Is this a wise policy?
The problem with postcolonial socialism is that it requires dictators. Obama's father wished to become a dictator in a country (Kenya) that instead adopted the free-market approach, and he never quite made it to dictator. Instead, he fell into alcoholic rage and lost one position after another.
"For the most part, Africa rejected the route of free market capitalism and adopted a route of centralized planning and African socialism. Overall, Africa rejected Jomo Kenyatta's approach in favor of the approach of Barack Obama Sr. Over the past half-century, Africa has witnessed a succession of dictators and strongmen such as Mobutu Sese Soko in Zaire, Idi Amin in Uganda, and Hastings Kamuzu Bandi in Malawi. These thugs quickly learned the language of anticolonialism and used it as a pretext to confiscate property and appropriate it for themselves and their cronies. Moreover, these men continued for decades to blame the failures of their societies on the legacy of colonialism, freeing them from the responsibility of raising the people's standard of living. Even today Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, one of the last of the Big Daddy despots, has declared his mission as one of rooting out the last vestiges of colonial rule from his country. His strategy for doing that is to drive the European and Asian entrepreneurs out of the country and to seize the most productive lands of the white farmers. As a result, Mugabe's once productive country has been reduced to economic ruins, and most of the population is either starving or running away" (212).
Obama wants to do to America what his father wished to do to Kenya. Our entrepreneurs are already hastening to get out of this country, and set up shop elsewhere where confiscatory taxation and the ever-growing demands of government on entrepreneurs is not so leveling.
With the latest election, and a new Republican majority in the House, there is a sense that Obama's term in the Oval Office is coming to an end. As a result, the economic springs of the country may begin to have a bit of bounce. More people than last year went shopping on Black Friday, and shopowners exulted. Profit came back into the picture. No doubt, Obama will take credit for this and have another go at extending his power over the next four years and have another chance at getting his dad's crazy ideas into our legislative process. Obama will stop at nothing to make his father's dreams into reality.
"The most powerful country in the world is being governed according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s -- a polygamist who abandoned his wives, drank himself into stupors, and bounced around on two iron legs (after his real legs had to be amputated after a car crash), raging against the world for denying him the realization of his anti-colonial ambitions. This philandering, inebriated African socialist is now setting the nation's agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son. The son is the one who is making it happen, but the son is, as he candidly admits, only living out his father's dream. The invisible father provides the inspiration, and the son dutifully gets the job done. America today is being governed by a ghost" (198).
In the last chapter D'Souza argues that Obama is the Last Anticolonialist. D'Souza argues, on the other hand, that colonialism is the best thing that ever happened to India. Instead of the caste system, and a group of 3% of Brahmins setting the agenda, now the whole of India can vote, women can read and write, and aren't expected to throw themselves on the pyres of their dead husbands who were often thrice their age. There is a fair judicial system. There is mandatory schooling for all. The endemic poverty that held most of India down for thousands of years is beginning to lift as Indian entrepreneurs manufacture under a fair and consistent set of rules that guarantee that the risk of their investments won't be arbitrarily seized by some dictator or high falutin' maharaja.
D'Souza quotes India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on the benefits of British colonialism, "Our notions of the rule of law, of a Constitutional government, of a free press, of a professional civil service, of modern universities and research laboratories have all been fashioned in the crucible where an age-old civilization met the dominant Empire of the day" (209).
D'Souza himself believes that India benefited, although there was at first a humiliation as India had to realize it was outmoded in terms of its military ability, and in every other way, by a western power.
"So while Obama fumes, I am happy to raise my glass and toast that curmudgeonly old defender of the British empire, Winston Churchill" (209).
Africa's disaster is that it missed out on British imperialism, D'Souza writes. Mosquitoes and "a host of deadly diseases" (210), kept the British out of Africa. "A strong case can be made that Africa's problem isn't colonialism but too little colonialism" (210). The poorest regions of the world are those that had little contact or too little contact with Britain. South America and the Philippines were under the Spanish. Most of Africa was never fully under the sway of the British.
Meanwhile, America and Australia are now very wealthy and solid countries, as is New Zealand. South Africa is a wealthy country because the situation allowed the British to take control of the country. While racism was clearly an issue in South Africa, the calories were more plentiful in South Africa than in the rest of the continent. If you look at the Human Development Index, it is only South Africa that ranks relatively high (out in the Indian Ocean but still technically belonging to Africa, is also the island of Mauritius, an English-speaking island that is relatively prosperous by comparison with the reeking rot of redolent ruin that consumes most of Africa with the exception of Kenya).
Places that came under Portuguese domination such as Brazil are still economic backwaters.
We fixed Japan's wagon after World War II, and it is right up there with the first world.
The postcolonial notion is that America is seizing the goods of the poorer nations. In fact, those nations that came fully under our sway always did better in the long run. Those that come under the sway of China or some other power stink by comparison.
"Contrary to the charges of the anti-colonialists, the United States today has no intention of ruling or seeking tribute from other countries; America's foreign policy goals are basically to encourage people to trade with us and to make sure they don't bomb us" (216).
D'Souza's books aren't always this well-written. I've read some of his other books and they pop around from idea to idea as if he's got Attention Deficit Syndrome. This book is one fastball after another thrown elegantly at 108 mph right down the pipe of the anticolonialist mentality. It's a series-ending no-hitter.
In the acknowledgements, D'Souza writes, "Mary Beth Baker did the editing that makes my work flow so well; if at any time it doesn't flow so well, direct all complaints to Mary Beth" (219). Mary Beth Baker must have coaxed the best from D'Souza -- like a savvy catcher and coach combined into one.
It's a brief book, that can be finished in two or three sittings. It's clear and fascinating, taking no more time to read than to watch a single game of the World Series. It is probably not the last word on Obama, but it might be the best. I intend to read Kloppenberg's liberal assessment, Reading Obama (Princeton 2010), sometime over the Christmas break (too busy until then). D'Souza's book might singlehandedly change the political thinking of our nation as the left continues to pull students and professors into the postcolonial black hole. This book shows that that's a mistake, and returns us to our best and sunniest game: democratic and pluralistic capitalism under the protection of Locke and Smith.
28 comments:
Kirby,
I have a poster in my office at home, which consists of the following quote from BHO, "For as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on earth is my story even possible."
D'Souza's form of "scholarship" consists of formulating a hypothesis, and then gathering evidence in favor of it. But this is defective, because true scholarship is a search for truth. If you don't consider contradictory evidence, your no scholar.
Kirb:
I have the feeling I'm in a time warp when I read your "review" of this book, which sounds like one of those little propaganda quality paperback items that booksellers put on their selling counter. As bad as this D.Souza book sounds to me, I assume the ones Noam Chomsky publishes must sound as haywire to you.
The so-called Colonial and Post-Colonial periods in history are confused in your descriptions of the book. Colonialism was primarily a practice of "taking" by Western European nations of land and cultures in the Third World. Its primary purpose was economic exploitation. Secondarily, it involved subduing native societies, in order to better control them and render them pliable for exploitation. The so-called "White Burden" was a strategy cooked up by them to pretend to be "helping" or "civilizing" the dominated peoples. In nearly every case, this involved the violent suppression of nativist custom, political and cultural domination, and the sweeping away of thousands of years of tradition and custom. This was "justified" by the sense of "innate" superiority of the "white races" upon presumptions of superiority of Western values, scientific and technological advancements, and religious intolerance and proselytization. Like the Knights Templars who rode off to "defeat the Infidels" Western colonial powers determined to "convert" the "heathens" and bring order and obedience to the pathetic "children" of the third world.
Whether or not you accept that this paradigm was good or bad, it's a period in history which has largely been swept away. Nevertheless, vestiges and remnants of it continue to influence how we deal with the Third World nations. We can't go backwards into history and "undo" what took place. India will always bear the evidence of its domination and suppression, just as America will. (America, remember, was once a colonial "Third World" nation itself.)
End Part I
Part II
The economic ills that America suffers from at present are the result of the "globalization" of capital investment. Capital is playing one country off against another, driving down compensation and reaping unbridled rewards for doing so. In Third World countries, this has the effect of appearing to "raise" standards, even though the relative "gains" are modest by historical standards. In the "First World" this has had the effect of driving down wages, and sucking capital investment away from once-prosperous economies. Bottom line, no one wins except those who are running these shell games. This isn't classical capitalism, in which aspiration and sacrifice raise everyone up. It's just a new form of exploitation. Economies do indeed get "meaner" and "leaner"--but at the expense of the prosperity of the older industrialized nations. The Third World workers aren't unionized, and have no rights. The First Worlders see their protections and benefits steadily eroded in the name of necessity and "efficiency" and the privileges of capital investment.
Whether Obama has any answer for this trend remains to be seen. I was never impressed with his "agenda"--at least, that much of it that was even presented. As far as I could tell, he had no plan. Since assuming office, I see nothing in his policies or behavior that look anything unfamiliar. Clinton wanted national health care, and a restrained foreign policy (no wars of choice). Financial regulations adopted in prior decades caused the meltdown which greeted him when he took office.
I wish Obama had gotten us out of these wars of attrition. American had an opportunity to balance its budget, under Bush II, and it didn't. Now that the deficit is ramping up again, we don't have the options we had before. National health will put additional strains on our budget. Continued tax "holidays" for the rich will exacerbate it. Whether we like it or now, we're going to have to pay off that debt. Everyone's taxes are going to rise. The economy may not improve, as long as globalization and phony "free trade" measures continue.
One of the striking things he does is to try to separate Obama from Marxism, and say, he's no Marxist, but he IS a postcolonialist.
Many, but apparently not all postcolonialists, are Marxist.
Another strong root would be to trace the lineage of Frank Marshall Davis in Obama's writings.
A similar book could probably be done with that heritage.
But I think that Obama can't remain strictly loyal to his father's ideas. It's true perhaps that the apple never falls far from the tree. But it can roll a little long way.
Is it possible that his father's ideas are nuanced by other ideas?
D'Souza's claim that we have the ghost of a Luo tribesman living in the Oval Office has some essential truth to it, but I imagine that Obama has a few other people in his inner council when he makes a decision besides just his dad.
One would be Frank Marshall Davis, who really was a communist through and through.
And he says he sought out Marxist professors in college. Surely he has at least some Marxism in his intellectual DNA.
Liberation theology via Reverend Wright was at least to some extent a cocktail with a Marxist base.
No doubt Obama remains drunk on that, too.
But isn't there anything healthy he's picked up en route? You'd think he would have at least come across the ideas of Locke and Smith, and found something good in those men's ideas.
There's no evidence of it, though, that I know of.
Imagine a pragmatic center-left politician.
Then think about what they would have done had they been pres. for the past two years.
Then think about what Obama has done.
They match up.
If D-nesh thinks that Obama letting the Bush tax cuts expire for the wealthy is some kind of Extreme position, I would think it's his perspective that's prolly skewed, no?
Kirby,
There's no evidence of it, though, that I know of.
The essential semantic content of this assertion is to be found in its terminating clause.
That D'Souza argues against Obama as Marxist does not prove that he considered evidence against the "Obama as post-colonialist" hypothesis. Only that he nailed his thesis to the next tree over. I'll give him credit though for recognizing the indefensibility of the "Obama as Marxist" hypothesis, and so clearly, there was something for you to learn from D'Souza.
Anyway, although I don't agree with all of it, I think you might benefit from considering the following:
NYT: David Brooks, "Getting Obama Right."
Kirby, thanks for the posting on D'Souza's book. What I've read of his thesis on President Obama's paternally-inspired anticolonialist bent is interesting and plausible, though I'm still reserved about the application of his thesis to a number of policy decisions the Obama administration has made. But I'll not prejudge the full treatment D'Souza gives his thesis as stu evidently has.
Another Indian scholar who's worth reading on the benefits of British rule in India (sans the British imperial-age racial snobbery, which, as V S Naipaul has it, is only exceeded by that of the Indians themselves) is Nirad C Chaudhuri (1897-1999), author of "The biography of an Unknown Indian" (1951), "Thy Hand, Great Anarch!" (1987; you'll recall the title reference from the end of Pope's "Dunciad"), etc. The dedication of the former reads:
"To the memory of the British Empire in India,
Which conferred subjecthood upon us,
But withheld citizenship.
To which yet every one of us threw out the challenge:
'Civis Britannicus sum'
Because all that was good and living within us
Was made, shaped and quickened
By the same British rule."
For this dedication and book he lost his job and his civil service pension, and he and his family were consigned to penury for years. He persevered, however, and continued writing, and in the last few decades of his long life, he and his wife moved to Oxford UK where he later received the Order of the British Empire.
Marxism has its own postcolonials esp. in the Eastern European sphere, and I suppose it is there that you'd most likely find intellectuals devoted to Locke and Smith and throwing away the Keynes.
Postcolonialism is an enormous term that has under its umbrella not only capitalist systems such as Great Britain's with its takeover of much of the equatorial region, but also bringing with it certain kinds of progress: trains, laws, medicine, free education, a new role for women in many societies (including that in contemporary Afghanistan and Iraq), and so on.
The United States and Canada and Australia are postcolonial, too.
You could see the new hit TV series Outsourced as a series of references on postcolonialism. But it's not so simple: we take your stuff, you suffer.
Often the colonizing powers made alliances with local fiefdoms, and as with any institutional struggle often conferred many benefits on those they employed.
D'Souza's argument is that in building up India, England was in general a very good thing for his native country.
There are other people like Gayatri Spivak (born a Brahmin) who resist the notion that Britain did anything good for her country.
Ask the Untouchables if they prefer life after the Brahmin had been forced out, and with equality (spreading outwards from Protestant Christianity, which the Untouchables are joining in enormous numbers while the Brahmin try to kill them and massacre them as apostates).
It's a very tricky conversation, and so far we've only heard one side. D'Souza raises another whole side to the issue, and one that is often quite thoroughly aligned with The universal Declaration of Human rights -- a document sponsored by the UN and written under the presidency of Eleanor Roosevelt, and with Indian women on the central planning committee.
Meanwhile, the Marxists have their own postcolonials, many of whom look to the Anglophone community for a good direction.
If D'Souza is right that Obama is trying to fill his father's shoes (he makes a very strong case for this) then we should be very afraid, as should the entire world.
I do see Chomsky as a nutcase since he rarely understands anything about the religious culture of the people he's writing about. He never understood that E. Timor was a Portuguese Christian enclave and was getting destroyed by the Muslims next door.
To his credit, he continued to speak for them through a long dark period of the 80s and 90s when no one else ever mentioned their plight. He just didn't understand it.
But at least he cared about them. I honor him for that.
Brooks is the NYT's supposed centrist, but he also shills for the left from that position, and I see him as a cover story centrist with a deeply liberal taproot. He's the one who came up with the Obama is Niebuhrian meme without apparently realizing that there are two Niebuhr's: the earlier socialist, and the later hawk and fiscal conservative.
Which one Brooks meant was never clear because he himself wasn't very clear.
I see Brooks as a well-meaning man who doesn't know anything about anything, and yet thinks he does.
It's sad, like the paper he writes for. I trust that paper about as much as I'd trust Pravda. Actually, less, because it tries to present itself as objective and universal.
Fox has GENUINE members of the opposite team on their shows. Sure, they are outnumbered, and they come off as witless, but at least they are on.
WSJ also lets in clueless lefties. Pamela Anderson got to do her little PETA spiel, for instance, on the editorial page no less.
David Brooks is some kind of marshmallow. He never says anything at all, and when he does, he's not sharp enough to understand that he hasn't.
Brooks' essential use for the NYT is that of making them attempt to seem pluralist, but also always endorsing their positions, whatever they happen to be.
It's interesting to hear about Chaudhuri, about whom I'd never heard.
People like that are never disseminated in academia. They are kept as dark secrets.
Kirby, I also read the Brooks column stu linked (thanks to him for that), and it left me with pretty much the same impression as yours: the congenial marshmallowy suck-up, who once decided that after staring at Barack Obama's perfectly-creased pant-leg he'd, he'd, yes--make a very good president indeed!
Brooks is about as much as The New York Times or PBS (probably stu, too) could take to represent the "Republican" minority case in political commentary.
At least the Washington Post features a clear and incisive conservative commentator in Charles Krauthammer.
Brett, you wrote, "If D-nesh thinks that Obama letting the Bush tax cuts expire for the wealthy is some kind of Extreme position, I would think it's his perspective that's prolly skewed, no?"
I don't think he ever talks specifically about this.
Stu, I didn't take D'souza's book as the truth, which has to be fairly subjective in such an area as trying to estimate another's sensibility, but it's extremely well-researched.
I think the book by Kloppenberg also starts out with a paradigm (pragmatic left of center dude) and then tries to find evidence to support that view.
It's not clear to me that truth in politics is the same thing as truth in science. Water always freezes at 32 degrees.
Will Obama always choose to go postcolonial, and is it always his dad to whom he turns when he asks himself what he should do?
Does he always say to himself, "Well, what would my dad do?"
Or, "What would my mom want me to do because my dad would have willed it?"
I do think Obama probably has a tightly guarded inner council composed of his mom and dad (most people think about what their mom and dad would do, I should think, which is why we have moms and dads) and in addition, whoever else trained us to think about the world.
Obama admits he sought out Marxist professors.
Thosemust be on his inner council, even if he hides those from public view.
I think the Niebuhr bit was an attempt to throw hounddogs off his trail. It threw Brooks off (not so difficult, considering who is paying him for his commentary).
There are now a number of books tracing Obama's beliefs. Jerome Corsi argued that Wright and Frank Marshall Davis were also part of the Big O's inner council.
I imagine Michelle has some influence.
I don't see anyone anywhere near him who is at all pragmatic in their approach.
He does cite Saul Alinsky as an influence. Which means he won't be open with what he's plotting.
But I don't see anyone in the center or to the right of center with the possible exception of Larry Summers (who's now gone).
Rahm emmanuel wasn't in any sense a centrist or the kind of guy who wanted to work out compromises. He wanted to hammer home an agenda and steamroll anyone who stood in its way.
All the centrist and other stuff is poppycock. There is no one close to him who is in any real sense a centrist. His mom and dad were postcolonials to the bone.
So I think D'Souza probably has him right, but I don't understand why he doesn't think there's any Marxism much in Obama. Obama himself says that he sought out Marxist professors in college.
I didn't do that.
I always thought they were lunatics.
Why did he do that? I assume it was because of Frank Marshall Davis, who got him all excited about Marxism.
He can't just come out and say he's a Marxist.
But I think he really is, in spite of what D'Souza says.
I'm looking forward to the Kloppenberg book.
"Obama, ever the mediator of these differences, then declares that he will settle for the rich paying their fair share -- say 40 or 50 percent. In this way Obama's outrageously high taxation comes to seem sensible against the backdrop of two extreme positions, even though no one really holds those positions"
Letting the Bush Tax cuts expire would push the rich's taxes to 39% - very close to the 40% claimed here.
If that's not what's being talked about, is he really then just posing a completely hypothetical example of the way he thinks Obama argues?
what?
And oh - the right has to spend all of this time pattering on and on about their conspiracies regarding his supposed intellectual heritage and his postcolonial Marxist yada yada because they can't face the simple facts -
The policies he's proposed have been moderate, and he has compromised on a great number of issues.
If you look at what he's actually Done as president, there's little you can do to claim that he's further to the left than, say, Bill Clinton.
Butmarxismsocialismderpderp!!!...Right. I get it. And Bush's decisions were all based on nothing more than his daddy complex...
And it's a nefarious rhetorical tactic to
a) describe his approach based on association, and
b) to focus on only those associations that bolster your own opinion.
Sure, the Bush family and the Bin Laden family are close, but that's not a big deal...
To be less snarky about it, how about Warren Buffet? Seems pretty centrist t' me...
Buffeted by the Soros of Time, Obama ...
We could have a poetry contest that started with that line, and ended with Children, children, don't you know.
I suppose.
I'm not sure how close he is to Buffet. Buffet does like Obama and tries to provide support. But Buffet hasn't really got anything much to lose.
He's part of some weird aging billionaire's club that remind me of a bunch of high-kicking Scrooges hellbent on doing something nice after their decades of acquisition as they prepare to meet their Maker.
Who knows what any of them are really up to.
But your introduction of Buffet does give me pause.
I just don't think he's part of Obama's inner Council.
Do you?
Does James think that Obama is further left than Clinton(s) not just on current and open matters, but more importantly, in his heart of hearts?
Clinton never said he openly sought out Marxist professors.
Did he?
I can't even imagine him talking like that, or Hillary talking like that.
That's how Obama talks.
Can you imagine Hillary getting a send-off party from Bill Ayers?
Can you imagine them sitting in a Liberation Theology Church?
Can you imagine them calling the police of Cambridge stupid on National TV?
Obama's following a different drum, I think.
"heart of hearts."
Only God can know that Kirby.
Conjecturing on what you think is going on in the heart of hearts of a politician is a pretty easy way to dodge actually dealing with the policies that a president has proposed.
And Buffet definitely has more of a relationship with Obama than Ayers or those long-lost Marxist professors that you base most all of your view of Obama on.
Kirby, were you a Republican in the 90s, you'd've thought Clinton was a murderer.
Brett, I don't think you can tell what I would have thought. I assume you think I'm crazy to read a book by Dinesh D'Souza, because he's not part of your group, and therefore I'd believe anything?
I couldn't quite grasp the leap you had made.
Do you mean because he bombed Serbian positions?
Here's a glimpse of Dinesh D'Souza debating Princeton Philosopher Peter Singer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Phgb67NAaHA&feature=related
Does he come off as insane in the clip?
He's arguing that the Christian worldview is superior to the pagan worldview. Perhaps many of us would be on D'Souza's side in this particular debate, so he will come off as less crazy.
I am well aware that many thought Bush had the IQ of a chimp because they didn't agree with or understand his paradigm (Locke-Smith) and preferred their own (Marx).
Those same people often thought Obama was the brightest person to have ever lived, because his viewpoint matched their own.
But D'Souza is certainly not an idiot (Bush was not one, either).
Just try a few minutes of the clip. He's quite calm and reasonable. His book is also very well-argued and sustained by very good research, a fine sense of humor, and an attempt to reach across the aisle, and be reasonable.
I think he and Singer, and he and Hitchens, and other people he's debated with, arrived at a position of mutual respect.
I do think it's possible to do that!
By the way, thanks very much for voting for my novel in the Ellechor competition.
Facebook is a phenomenon of younger people than myself, and I have almost no presence on it. Unfortunately, it was chosen as the site of contest for the voting, which meant I had to scramble to get voters. This meant that I had to try to mobilize nephews and nieces -- many of whom are less than ten years of age.
Some did get over there and vote for my novel, which is a good thing, but I am still lagging way behind.
The contest is turning out to be a matter of how often you use Facebook, and how many friends do you have there.
Oy vey!
At any rate, just give this little D'Souza clip a chance. The rest of the debate will pop up in the margins if you have that kind of time to watch it. I haven't done so yet.
Kirby, I think in President Obama we have a liberal-left ideologue whose ideological bent is sometimes tempered by inexperience and incompetence. Likewise his woefully incompetent Attorney General Eric Holder. I also think he's made some compromises he envisions as tactical ploys, somewhat like way-stations reached on a much longer march to the left in "remaking America." I don't think President Clinton had such a sordid array of leftist connections as President Obama, but then President Clinton was sometimes willing to compromise with a Republican Congress. President Obama has had a pretty compliant Democratic Congress, so he's been fortunate there. But now that's changed. That said, I agree that it's risky to speculate too adamantly about his hidden motivations and motives behind his presidential pronouncements and performance, though as I said, I think D'Souza's approach interesting and plausible.
Your paragraph on the "high-kicking Scrooges" was hilarious! And if Buffet et al wish to donate bags of cash to the feds, who's stopping them?
The school where I started college had this Jewish sociology prof who was denied tenure. He hired a lawyer and appealed the decision on the grounds that his tenure was denied because he was Marxist.
I never took any of his courses. They were always full on the first day of registration. But I did go in and talk with him about registering for his class. He recommended a book he thought I'd like called Penguin Island by Anatole France. And he invited me to a party at his place with some of his students. It was like beer and tacos. The guy was a dead ringer for Ken Kesey, so he was definitely a guru.
I tried out for the swim team my sophomore year, but came down with mononucleosis. I lost forty pounds and the whole semester was a washout. I got my weight back a few months later, but my muscle tone and endurance were shot.
The daughter of the swim coach had political aspirations. She recruited me to swim intramurals that spring for the David W***** Defense Fund. All of the other teams were fraternities and sororities. I won the 50 yard breaststroke by about three seconds. We didn't actually contribute any money to the professor's cause, but the school newspaper did a nice write-up on it, so it was some excellent free publicity.
The intramurals victory got the daughter of the swim coach elected to a student government office. I don't know how things worked out for the sociology prof.
Kirby, I was just making a statement that you tend to buy into some conspiratorial-thinking, that you get caught up in a groundswell of making connections between nodes of information that are both less important and less relevant to each other than you claim.
It's not cause you read D-nesh that I made a statement about you having this approach - it's because you judge Obama through a decidedly-skewed lens.
It'd be like if I viewed everything W did based on the fact that he and his family have close ties to the bin Laden family.
Brett, I can't see that similarity. D'Souza has a very powerful mind, and has debated many of the top people on the left: Hitchens, Singer, Dawkins, among others.
If you said that if your judgment of Bush was colored by say Michael Moore's books there would at least be a parallel, but no one of any stature even on the left takes Michael Moore seriously.
So I still don't know what you're talking about.
It's snowing here.
All of your posts for the past few months on Obama have been 'blah blah blah, he sought out marxists professors, blah blah blah, he sought out Marxist professors.'
And you give this much more weight and meaning than it deserves.
It'd be like if every time I talked about Bush, I said 'blah blah blah, his family <3s bin Ladens, blah blah blah, his family <3s bin Ladens."
Brett, I think you are making a huge logical mistake here.
The Bin Laden family refudiated Osama in 1994. From Wikipedia:
"In 1994, the bin Laden family disowned Osama and the Saudi government revoked his passport."
That's not the only logical mistake you are making. You imply that Bush at one time embraced Osama Bin Laden's ideology.
This is about ideology.
Obama DID embrace Marxism, and openly admits to this. Did he ever refudiate it? Can you find a position where he deliberately refudiates this ideology?
I think we're going to go around and around in circles on this topic, mostly because of your failure to think clearly on this topic.
Marxism = Marxism.
Is that clear?
Osama Bin Laden DOES NOT equal THE BIN LADEN FAMILY.
The parallel you are trying to make is wrong on at least two counts. I'm not certain if there is any way for me to make this clear to you!
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