It wouldn’t have been surprising to see Dinesh D’Souza’s article “How Obama Thinks” on a far-right-wing blog. But it’s worth noticing when such a transparent attempt to discredit the president of the United States turns up in a world-class business publication—even a conservative publication—of the stature of Forbes.
D’Souza’s article talks about Obama’s policies as if they were “bizarre,” a word he actually uses—as if no real American would think of hiking taxes on the rich or allowing Moslems to build a community center with a prayer hall (not a supermosque) in a semi-down-at-heel neighborhood two blocks from (not “at”) Ground Zero.
Obama’s thinking, runs D’Souza’s thesis, must be exotic, unAmerican. How else can we account for it? Not, apparently, by looking at a CNN poll from August showing that 69 percent of Americans think taxes on the super-rich ought to be higher. Not by noticing that every program mentioned in the piece had the approval of large numbers of Americans.Not by remembering that the local permitting committee in New York approved the community center several times.
No: it must be that Obama is an anticolonialist like his father. It must be that the president “views some of the Muslims who are fighting against America abroad as resisters of U.S. imperialism.” Anticolonialism would also explain “why he wants people who are already paying close to 50 percent of their income in overall taxes to pay even more.” (Footnote: Even Ronald Reagan, hardly a wild-eyed anticolonialist, raised taxes, including taxes on business, to combat economic slowdown and unemployment.)
There are rational ways of discussing the influence of parents on presidents. Those ways aren’t likely to include the kind of language D’Souza uses about Obama’s father: “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.”
Even a Forbes staffer, copy editor Craig Silver, called the article “a stupefyingly inane, quasi-racist bomb-toss.” Obama’s father’s real and/or suspected drinking and womanizing have nothing to do with national policy; the ad hominem coloring of this piece, apart from its intellectual dishonesty, suggests that Obama is persona non grata with interests to which Forbes is friendly—that the president has stepped out of line and is being sent a message to that effect. While liberals complain that Obama is too cozy with big business, somebody seems to think very differently.
