Frisco_Slug_Esq
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I'm going with a hard-drive stash...
Lots of photoshop.
Lots of photoshop.
Barack Obama is lying about not being friends with Bill Ayers...
- Thread starter Cap’n AMatrixca
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Frisco_Slug_Esq
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It's the Kinko's version of Anthromorphological Palin-Change...
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James Lewis
American Thinker
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Jack's Back!
It surprised me to learn that David Remnick had dedicated three pages of his comprehensive new Obama biography, The Bridge, to my thesis that Bill Ayers helped Barack Obamawrite Obama's 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father.
It will surprise Remnick even more to learn that he has unwittingly reinforced a thesis that he set out to discredit.
I stumbled on the reference to yours truly rather by accident. I was searching the index to see what Remnick had to say about Bill Ayers and found the first mention on page 253 in this intriguing context, "The true author of Obama's book, Jack Cashill suggested, was likely Bill Ayers."
The reference to me, I quickly discovered, is not a kind one. In the way of credentials, Remnick allows me no discernible Ph.D. in American studies, no Fulbright, no articles in Fortune or the Wall Street Journal, no well-received book on intellectual fraud, no books at all.
...
Remnick likewise spares his cocoon the research Christopher Andersen had done on Dreams. In his bestseller, Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage, Andersen spends six pages confirming my thesis through boots-on-the-ground reporting. "Thanks to help from the veteran writer Ayers," writes Andersen in summary, "Barack would be able to submit a manuscript to his editors at Times Books."
...
This "libel," Remnick tells us, had a "diabolic potency," and the devil himself -- Rush Limbaugh -- was spreading it. Remnick quotes Limbaugh's October 10, 2008 discussion of my book at length. The Limbaugh quote reads in part:
There is no evidence that [Obama] has any kind of writing talent. We haven't seen anything he wrote at Harvard Law, or when he was at Columbia, or any tests that he's written. But if you read his books, if you listen to the audio reading of the book here, you don't hear this when Obama goes out and speaks.
Remnick cannot resist the progressive urge to race-bait. True to form, he reminds his audience of "the ugly pedigree" of my and Limbaugh's "racist insinuation." Given the nastiness of the charge, one would have expected him to supply some supportive evidence. He doesn't. Ironically, all the new information that Remnick does provide serves only to strengthen my argument.
In his 600-plus pages of surprisingly lifeless prose -- Ayers is the better writer -- Remnick does, at least, find his way into certain corners of Obama's life that the media had not previously penetrated. Among these are the New York years, about which Obama had declined even the New York Times' "repeated requests" for information. Post-election, Remnick makes a little more headway.
At Columbia, Remnick tells us, Obama was an "unspectacular" student. Northwestern University communications professor John McKnight reinforces the point, telling Remnick, "I don't think [Obama] did too well in college."
McKnight, a Chicago friend, wrote a letter of reference for Obama to attend Harvard Law School. Remnick assures us that Obama was a "serious" student at Columbia, just not a particularly good one. Still, Obama finessed his way into a law school that chooses its 500 new students each year from 7,000 applicants whose LSAT scores generally chart in the 98th to 99th percentile range and whose GPAs average between 3.80 and 3.95. How this "unspectacular" student got in is a mystery that Remnick chooses not to explore. As to Obama's LSAT scores, Jimmy Hoffa's body may well be discovered before those are.
Obama certainly did not write well when he was at Columbia. Remnick charitably describes the one article Obama wrote for Columbia's weekly news magazine, Sundial, as "muddled," and he is referring only to the content. The grammar is worse. As I have previously noted, in his 1800-word, article Obama manages an appalling five noun-verb mismatches, and the punctuation is equally capricious.
Still, like millions of other Americans, Obama saw himself as a would-be novelist. Unfortunately, as Jerry Kellman, the organizer who recruited Obama to Chicago, informed Remnick, "[Obama] told me that he had trouble writing, he had to force himself to write."
After leaving for Harvard Law in 1988, Obama returned to Chicago in 1991, where he signed on at the law firm of Davis Miner. There he worked as a full-time associate until he launched his state senate campaign in 1995. During those same years, Obama also taught classes at Chicago University Law School -- not as a professor, as Obama claimed during the campaign, but as a lecturer. Despite the fudge, Remnick makes a point of detailing how thorough and meticulous Obama was as both lawyer and teacher. Still, for all of Obama's presumed literary talents, it strikes even Remnick a bit strange that "he never published a single academic article."
In 1991, Obama also began to work in earnest on the book that he had contracted to write for Poseidon, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. "The advance was reportedly over a $100,000," Remnick writes. "Obama received half of that amount on signing the contract."
By 1991, Obama had met Michelle, and the two indulged in a social life that would have left Scarlett O'Hara dizzy. Writes Remnick, "He and Michelle accepted countless invitations to lunches, dinners, cocktail parties, barbecues, and receptions for right minded charities." Obama also joined the East Bank Club, a combined gym and urban country club, and served on at least a few charitable boards.
Obama's obligations were taking their toll. "Obama had missed deadlines and handed in bloated, yet incomplete drafts," Remnick tells us. Simon & Schuster lost patience. In late 1992, weeks after the Obamas' marriage, the firm canceled the contract.
Not surprisingly, Remnick skips some of the details that Andersen included, like how Obama had spent $75,000 of the advance and could not pay it back. According to Andersen, the publisher let Obama keep the money only after he pled poverty due to "massive student loan debt."
At the time, the Obamas, still childless, were making well into six figures between them as they partied their way through progressive Chicago's frenzied social life. According to Remnick, Bill Ayers and weatherwoman bride Bernadine Dohrn played a highly visible role in that life. Remnick calls them collectively the "Elsa Maxwell of Hyde Park."
After his agent secured Obama a smaller contract with the Times Books division of Random House, Barack decamped to Bali -- Bali? -- in early 1993 in the hope that he would be able to finish the book without interruption. The sojourn proved fruitless. He still could not produce.
Remnick papers over the two years between Bali and the book's 1995 publication. He quotes Henry Ferris, the Times Book editor, to bolster Obama's claim to authorship. Ferris "worked directly with Obama," Remnick tells us, but Ferris edited in New York while Obama wrote in Chicago. Ferris would have had no way of knowing just how much of the editing or writing Obama was doing himself.
In late 1994, Obama finally submitted his manuscript for publication. Remnick expects the faithful to believe that a mediocre student who had nothing in print save for the occasional "muddled" essay, who blew a huge contract after more than two futile years, who wrote no legal articles, and who turned in bloated drafts when he did start writing, somehow found the time and inspiration during an absurdly busy period of his life to write what Time Magazine would call "the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician."
In his New York Times review of The Bridge, Gary Wills argues, "The art with which the book is constructed to serve his deepest personal needs shows how ludicrous is the charge of Rush Limbaugh and others that he did not write it." No, Gary, the "art" betrays the fraud. Obama's muse whispered in his own voice, not in Obama's.
The defense of Obama by Wills and Remnick should not surprise. As I discovered five years ago in the research for my book, Hoodwinked, America's intellectual elite has been crafting and enabling intellectual fraud for nearly a century. "Not unnaturally," I wrote, "people of influence in the cultural establishment are inclined to promote, praise, and protect those creative individuals who think as they do." The protected, by the way, include people of all colors, genders, and orientations. The protectors usually vote, sound, and condescend just like Wills and Remnick.
By any standard, Andersen's account of Dreams' publication rings truer than Remnick's. As Andersen tells it, Obama found himself deeply in debt and "hopelessly blocked." At "Michelle's urging," Obama "sought advice from his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers." What attracted the Obamas were "Ayers's proven abilities as a writer." Obama had already taped interviews with many of his relatives, both African and American. A tellingly specific sentence in Andersen's account is the one that follows: "These oral histories, along with his partial manuscript and a trunkload of notes were given to Ayers."
It surprised me to learn that David Remnick had dedicated three pages of his comprehensive new Obama biography, The Bridge, to my thesis that Bill Ayers helped Barack Obamawrite Obama's 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father.
It will surprise Remnick even more to learn that he has unwittingly reinforced a thesis that he set out to discredit.
I stumbled on the reference to yours truly rather by accident. I was searching the index to see what Remnick had to say about Bill Ayers and found the first mention on page 253 in this intriguing context, "The true author of Obama's book, Jack Cashill suggested, was likely Bill Ayers."
The reference to me, I quickly discovered, is not a kind one. In the way of credentials, Remnick allows me no discernible Ph.D. in American studies, no Fulbright, no articles in Fortune or the Wall Street Journal, no well-received book on intellectual fraud, no books at all.
...
Remnick likewise spares his cocoon the research Christopher Andersen had done on Dreams. In his bestseller, Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage, Andersen spends six pages confirming my thesis through boots-on-the-ground reporting. "Thanks to help from the veteran writer Ayers," writes Andersen in summary, "Barack would be able to submit a manuscript to his editors at Times Books."
...
This "libel," Remnick tells us, had a "diabolic potency," and the devil himself -- Rush Limbaugh -- was spreading it. Remnick quotes Limbaugh's October 10, 2008 discussion of my book at length. The Limbaugh quote reads in part:
There is no evidence that [Obama] has any kind of writing talent. We haven't seen anything he wrote at Harvard Law, or when he was at Columbia, or any tests that he's written. But if you read his books, if you listen to the audio reading of the book here, you don't hear this when Obama goes out and speaks.
Remnick cannot resist the progressive urge to race-bait. True to form, he reminds his audience of "the ugly pedigree" of my and Limbaugh's "racist insinuation." Given the nastiness of the charge, one would have expected him to supply some supportive evidence. He doesn't. Ironically, all the new information that Remnick does provide serves only to strengthen my argument.
In his 600-plus pages of surprisingly lifeless prose -- Ayers is the better writer -- Remnick does, at least, find his way into certain corners of Obama's life that the media had not previously penetrated. Among these are the New York years, about which Obama had declined even the New York Times' "repeated requests" for information. Post-election, Remnick makes a little more headway.
At Columbia, Remnick tells us, Obama was an "unspectacular" student. Northwestern University communications professor John McKnight reinforces the point, telling Remnick, "I don't think [Obama] did too well in college."
McKnight, a Chicago friend, wrote a letter of reference for Obama to attend Harvard Law School. Remnick assures us that Obama was a "serious" student at Columbia, just not a particularly good one. Still, Obama finessed his way into a law school that chooses its 500 new students each year from 7,000 applicants whose LSAT scores generally chart in the 98th to 99th percentile range and whose GPAs average between 3.80 and 3.95. How this "unspectacular" student got in is a mystery that Remnick chooses not to explore. As to Obama's LSAT scores, Jimmy Hoffa's body may well be discovered before those are.
Obama certainly did not write well when he was at Columbia. Remnick charitably describes the one article Obama wrote for Columbia's weekly news magazine, Sundial, as "muddled," and he is referring only to the content. The grammar is worse. As I have previously noted, in his 1800-word, article Obama manages an appalling five noun-verb mismatches, and the punctuation is equally capricious.
Still, like millions of other Americans, Obama saw himself as a would-be novelist. Unfortunately, as Jerry Kellman, the organizer who recruited Obama to Chicago, informed Remnick, "[Obama] told me that he had trouble writing, he had to force himself to write."
After leaving for Harvard Law in 1988, Obama returned to Chicago in 1991, where he signed on at the law firm of Davis Miner. There he worked as a full-time associate until he launched his state senate campaign in 1995. During those same years, Obama also taught classes at Chicago University Law School -- not as a professor, as Obama claimed during the campaign, but as a lecturer. Despite the fudge, Remnick makes a point of detailing how thorough and meticulous Obama was as both lawyer and teacher. Still, for all of Obama's presumed literary talents, it strikes even Remnick a bit strange that "he never published a single academic article."
In 1991, Obama also began to work in earnest on the book that he had contracted to write for Poseidon, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. "The advance was reportedly over a $100,000," Remnick writes. "Obama received half of that amount on signing the contract."
By 1991, Obama had met Michelle, and the two indulged in a social life that would have left Scarlett O'Hara dizzy. Writes Remnick, "He and Michelle accepted countless invitations to lunches, dinners, cocktail parties, barbecues, and receptions for right minded charities." Obama also joined the East Bank Club, a combined gym and urban country club, and served on at least a few charitable boards.
Obama's obligations were taking their toll. "Obama had missed deadlines and handed in bloated, yet incomplete drafts," Remnick tells us. Simon & Schuster lost patience. In late 1992, weeks after the Obamas' marriage, the firm canceled the contract.
Not surprisingly, Remnick skips some of the details that Andersen included, like how Obama had spent $75,000 of the advance and could not pay it back. According to Andersen, the publisher let Obama keep the money only after he pled poverty due to "massive student loan debt."
At the time, the Obamas, still childless, were making well into six figures between them as they partied their way through progressive Chicago's frenzied social life. According to Remnick, Bill Ayers and weatherwoman bride Bernadine Dohrn played a highly visible role in that life. Remnick calls them collectively the "Elsa Maxwell of Hyde Park."
After his agent secured Obama a smaller contract with the Times Books division of Random House, Barack decamped to Bali -- Bali? -- in early 1993 in the hope that he would be able to finish the book without interruption. The sojourn proved fruitless. He still could not produce.
Remnick papers over the two years between Bali and the book's 1995 publication. He quotes Henry Ferris, the Times Book editor, to bolster Obama's claim to authorship. Ferris "worked directly with Obama," Remnick tells us, but Ferris edited in New York while Obama wrote in Chicago. Ferris would have had no way of knowing just how much of the editing or writing Obama was doing himself.
In late 1994, Obama finally submitted his manuscript for publication. Remnick expects the faithful to believe that a mediocre student who had nothing in print save for the occasional "muddled" essay, who blew a huge contract after more than two futile years, who wrote no legal articles, and who turned in bloated drafts when he did start writing, somehow found the time and inspiration during an absurdly busy period of his life to write what Time Magazine would call "the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician."
In his New York Times review of The Bridge, Gary Wills argues, "The art with which the book is constructed to serve his deepest personal needs shows how ludicrous is the charge of Rush Limbaugh and others that he did not write it." No, Gary, the "art" betrays the fraud. Obama's muse whispered in his own voice, not in Obama's.
The defense of Obama by Wills and Remnick should not surprise. As I discovered five years ago in the research for my book, Hoodwinked, America's intellectual elite has been crafting and enabling intellectual fraud for nearly a century. "Not unnaturally," I wrote, "people of influence in the cultural establishment are inclined to promote, praise, and protect those creative individuals who think as they do." The protected, by the way, include people of all colors, genders, and orientations. The protectors usually vote, sound, and condescend just like Wills and Remnick.
By any standard, Andersen's account of Dreams' publication rings truer than Remnick's. As Andersen tells it, Obama found himself deeply in debt and "hopelessly blocked." At "Michelle's urging," Obama "sought advice from his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers." What attracted the Obamas were "Ayers's proven abilities as a writer." Obama had already taped interviews with many of his relatives, both African and American. A tellingly specific sentence in Andersen's account is the one that follows: "These oral histories, along with his partial manuscript and a trunkload of notes were given to Ayers."
Frisco_Slug_Esq
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When Obama and Ayers come clean, they'll say, "So what if it's true? It doesn't matter!"
Ceb will say, "It doesn't matter *squawk*"
__________________
"I am a radical, Leftist, small "c" Communist.... Maybe I am the last Communist willing to admit it.... The ethics of Communism still appeal to me."
William Ayers
Ceb will say, "It doesn't matter *squawk*"
__________________
"I am a radical, Leftist, small "c" Communist.... Maybe I am the last Communist willing to admit it.... The ethics of Communism still appeal to me."
William Ayers
cebalrai
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When Obama and Ayers come clean, they'll say, "So what if it's true? It doesn't matter!"
Ceb will say, "It doesn't matter *squawk*"
__________________
"I am a radical, Leftist, small "c" Communist.... Maybe I am the last Communist willing to admit it.... The ethics of Communism still appeal to me."
William Ayers
It already doesn't matter.
Frisco_Slug_Esq
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You're officially ahead of the curve...
__________________
Few of us survived the Joe McCarthy holocaust of the early 1950s and of those there were even fewer whose understandings and insights had developed beyond the dialectical materialism of orthodox Marxism.
Saul David Alinsky
Rules for Radicals
cebalrai
Literotica Guru
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You're officially ahead of the curve...
__________________
Few of us survived the Joe McCarthy holocaust of the early 1950s and of those there were even fewer whose understandings and insights had developed beyond the dialectical materialism of orthodox Marxism.
Saul David Alinsky
Rules for Radicals
Nobody cares but the kooks.
Frisco_Slug_Esq
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The kooks still believe he's not a dummy, but a genius, literary as well as scientific...
__________________
President Obama, with all that vast nuclear expertise he acquired as a community organizer, a part-time senator, and a candidate for president, has accomplished nothing to date with Iran or North Korea.
Sarah Palin
cebalrai
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The kooks still believe he's not a dummy, but a genius, literary as well as scientific...
__________________
President Obama, with all that vast nuclear expertise he acquired as a community organizer, a part-time senator, and a candidate for president, has accomplished nothing to date with Iran or North Korea.
Sarah Palin
And an extreme Christian AND a Muslim AND an atheist.
RobDownSouth
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Reader's Digest version: "I got a PhD! Who ya gonna believe? Me or that nigger's friend? And how DARE they call me a racist!"
Wingnuts always squeal like pigs when they get caught red-handed.
Frisco_Slug_Esq
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I've only ever claimed the first one was the Wright one...
Then, there's this...
Obama's Expatriate Years
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/obamas_expatriate_years.html
and this...
Professor Obama
http://forum.literotica.com/showthread.php?t=674050
__________________
Ayers wrote his book,
Harvard wrote his Review,
Apollo Alliance wrote his TARP,
Congress is writing his Health Care,
Nobel Committee awarded him extra credit...,
... and the Democrat Media is Wrighting his Legacy!
Then, there's this...
Obama's Expatriate Years
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/obamas_expatriate_years.html
and this...
Professor Obama
http://forum.literotica.com/showthread.php?t=674050
__________________
Ayers wrote his book,
Harvard wrote his Review,
Apollo Alliance wrote his TARP,
Congress is writing his Health Care,
Nobel Committee awarded him extra credit...,
... and the Democrat Media is Wrighting his Legacy!
Frisco_Slug_Esq
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RobDownSouth
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Dear Dances With Falsehoods,
Suck it up or put me on ignore, eunuch boy.
Sincerely,
RobDownSouth
cebalrai
Literotica Guru
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I've only ever claimed the first one was the Wright one...
Then, there's this...
Obama's Expatriate Years
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/obamas_expatriate_years.html
and this...
Professor Obama
http://forum.literotica.com/showthread.php?t=674050
__________________
Ayers wrote his book,
Harvard wrote his Review,
Apollo Alliance wrote his TARP,
Congress is writing his Health Care,
Nobel Committee awarded him extra credit...,
... and the Democrat Media is Wrighting his Legacy!
Again, nobody gives a shit about your conspiracy theories.
Powertone
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Hey RobSuxCock...have you and your partner exchanged rings in a ceremony yet ?
RobDownSouth
BoycotDivestSanctio
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Aw, AJ's favorite beta male comes in to support his buddy. You are sooooo gonna get a belly rub from AJ for this tonight! Yes you are! Yes you are!
Frisco_Slug_Esq
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Where's the missing girlfriends?
Jack Cashill
Jack Cashill
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In April of this year, I wrote an article for American Thinker about David Remnick's new book, The Bridge, and titled it, "New Obama Bio Strengthens
Case for Dreams Fraud."
"It surprised me to learn that David Remnick had dedicated three pages of his comprehensive new Obama biography, The Bridge, to my thesis that Bill Ayers helped Barack Obama write Obama's 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father," I wrote at the time. "It will surprise Remnick even more to learn that he has unwittingly reinforced a thesis that he set out to discredit."
That night, Milt Rosenberg of Chicago's dominant AM radio station, WGN, was hosting Remnick for two hours in studio. A mutual friend arranged for me to call in just as though I were a regular caller. I was finally able to locate the audio.
If I seem too polite in the exchange that follows, it's because I did not want to embarrass Rosenberg. This format offered the rare opportunity for someone from what Remnick calls the "Web's farthest lunatic orbit" to splash down in the refined waters of the liberal elite.
For the record, Remnick is the Princeton-educated, Washington Post-groomed, Pulitzer-Prize winning New Yorker editor. I am a "little-known conservative writer" who lives in Kansas City.
When I called in, I introduced myself, said that "David" would probably know who I am, and noted that I had originated the thesis that Bill Ayers helped Barack Obama write Dreams From My Father. The question I posed to Remnick was this: "Why did you ignore the six detailed pages Christopher Andersen spent confirming my thesis?"
Rosenberg, bless his heart, asked me who Andersen was and what was my thesis. This allowed me several minutes to report in detail what Andersen had discovered.
As I explained, Andersen is "a celebrity biographer with great establishment credentials." I said on air how I had talked to Andersen, who told me he had two sources on the ground in Hyde Park.
Rosenberg allowed me to establish in some detail how Andersen documented the Obamas' financial struggles in the early 1990s. Andersen related how at the urging of Michelle, a "hopelessly blocked" Obama turned to "friend and neighbor" Bill Ayers to help him with his much-acclaimed 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father.
Andersen's details are specific. The Obamas were convinced of "Ayers's proven abilities as a writer." Barack particularly liked the novelistic style of To Teach, a 1993 book by Ayers. Obama hoped to use a comparable style for his own family history. The problem was that although he had taped interviews with many of his relatives, he could not find it in himself to write the book.
Andersen documented Obama's blown advances, his futile escape to Bali, the growing financial and emotional pressure to finish a memoir he had started four years earlier.
The key sentence in Andersen's account is the one that I quoted on air almost verbatim: "These oral histories, along with his partial manuscript and a trunkload of notes were given to Ayers." Added Andersen, "Thanks to help from veteran writer Ayers, Barack would be able to submit a manuscript to his editors at Times Book."
I was also able to explain how up until the point of writing what Time Magazine called "the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician," Obama had written nothing of consequence. What he had written, said I, "as David points out," was a "muddled" article in a Columbia University weekly called Sundial, nothing at all as a legal scholar save for one case note at Harvard, and "one really half-assed article" on community organizing.
Remnick came out swinging, and as I knew, a person in studio has a huge tactical advantage over a person on the phone. The quotes that follow from Remnick are word-for-word. To get a true feel for what condescension sounds like in its purest, most undistilled form, please listen to the audio about 57 minutes in:
http://www.wgnradio.com/shows/ext720/wgnam-david-remnick-the-bridge-full-program,0,5756039.mp3file
"Mr. Castle [sic], this is David Remnick. Let's be clear about something. So on the basis of a book by a celebrity biographer of two unnamed sources -- who are those sources, by the way? Do you know?"
"He wouldn't tell me."
"Okay," said Remnick emphatically, as though his point had been confirmed.
"Do you reveal your unnamed sources?" I asked. Having read his book, I knew that Remnick used such sources, often for key details, and sometimes bogus ones -- like, for instance, the person known only as "aide" who misled Remnick on how Obama managed to write The Audacity of Hope.
"My book is filled with hundreds of named sources."
"But so is Andersen's."
"Yes, but you are not providing any sources here. So on the basis of two unnamed sources in a celebrity biographer's book that really has had very little currency and on your own notion that he uses the word 'eyes' a lot ... "
"Hold it right there," I said. "Hold it." Remnick had said something comparably slighting in his book. Those on the left are so used to saying such rubbish unchallenged that he must have forgotten where he was.
"I let you speak. Now you are going to let me respond."
"Go ahead," I conceded, trying not to make things awkward for my generous host.
"So it is hardly scientific," Remnick continued. "I find it deeply offensive. First of all, the history of literature is filled, filled with writers whose first books appear on the scene, and they are very good or excellent, or they are better."
This is true only to a degree. All great authors have a first book, usually very good, and always at the end of a paper trail strewn with other good writing. Obama's paper trail leads back to a literary junk pile. His sudden flowering is miraculous and unprecedented. Unfortunately, I did not have the chance to explain this on the air.
"I make no fantastic claims for his memoir," Remnick continued. "I don't come out of there claiming it to be Moby-Dick or Richard Wright or anything of the kind. I describe it as a very good book and no more and no less, but I examine it as a book that tells us something about Barack Obama, naturally, and something that comes out of the memoir tradition in African-American literature and American literature folklore."
Richard Wright is an African-American author. Note how Remnick feels the need to balance an undeniable classic by a white guy with a black guy of sufficiently lesser stature that he does not -- or cannot -- cite a Wright book. Affirmative action on the fly!
"So your theory, and it was a theory expounded as well by a much bigger microphone, by Rush Limbaugh, got a lot of currency on the internet, and I find it offensive on the minimal amount of proof you provided, in fact, on no proof at all that I could find convincing..."
"Well," I interjected.
"I am going to finish my thought here, okay?" Remnick scolded, sounding all the world like my second-grade nun. "There is something innately offensive about the notion that this man is incapable of writing a book." I should add that in his book, Remnick laments "the ugly pedigree" of my and Limbaugh's "racist insinuation."
"I am not saying he is stupid. I never did say that."
"But you are saying he is faking the book."
"Yes, I am absolutely saying that. He had help, serious help, and all evidence points in that direction." I must confess to being a little perturbed here. I plowed on.
"And when you reduce the twenty thousand or so words I did of textual comparison to saying 'something about eyes,' you are insulting me. And when you call me a racist, David, or when you call Limbaugh a racist, you are insulting the whole damn audience."
"The instances of Barack, uh...uh, Rush Limbaugh using racist language is so long as to beggar the imagination," Remnick answered, nearly averting a newsworthy Freudian slip. He then launched into an odd and disingenuous account of how he "has great respect for serious conservatives" who challenge Obama on his policies, the political equivalent of "some of my best friends are black."
"So why do you call me a racist?" I asked, cutting to the chase.
At this point, Rosenberg thanked me for calling in. If Remnick were gesturing wildly to kill the conversation, I would not have been surprised. Once he had imputed racism to a lesser mortal -- the most popular liberal hobby after recycling -- he had no other argument to make.
"I appreciate your having me on," I said to Rosenberg. "Sorry, but I don't like being called a racist, and that is part of the problem with the post-racial fraud we are living under now because all criticism is racist."
So the conversation ended. I don't get to talk to liberals much anymore.
Jack Cashill
"It surprised me to learn that David Remnick had dedicated three pages of his comprehensive new Obama biography, The Bridge, to my thesis that Bill Ayers helped Barack Obama write Obama's 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father," I wrote at the time. "It will surprise Remnick even more to learn that he has unwittingly reinforced a thesis that he set out to discredit."
That night, Milt Rosenberg of Chicago's dominant AM radio station, WGN, was hosting Remnick for two hours in studio. A mutual friend arranged for me to call in just as though I were a regular caller. I was finally able to locate the audio.
If I seem too polite in the exchange that follows, it's because I did not want to embarrass Rosenberg. This format offered the rare opportunity for someone from what Remnick calls the "Web's farthest lunatic orbit" to splash down in the refined waters of the liberal elite.
For the record, Remnick is the Princeton-educated, Washington Post-groomed, Pulitzer-Prize winning New Yorker editor. I am a "little-known conservative writer" who lives in Kansas City.
When I called in, I introduced myself, said that "David" would probably know who I am, and noted that I had originated the thesis that Bill Ayers helped Barack Obama write Dreams From My Father. The question I posed to Remnick was this: "Why did you ignore the six detailed pages Christopher Andersen spent confirming my thesis?"
Rosenberg, bless his heart, asked me who Andersen was and what was my thesis. This allowed me several minutes to report in detail what Andersen had discovered.
As I explained, Andersen is "a celebrity biographer with great establishment credentials." I said on air how I had talked to Andersen, who told me he had two sources on the ground in Hyde Park.
Rosenberg allowed me to establish in some detail how Andersen documented the Obamas' financial struggles in the early 1990s. Andersen related how at the urging of Michelle, a "hopelessly blocked" Obama turned to "friend and neighbor" Bill Ayers to help him with his much-acclaimed 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father.
Andersen's details are specific. The Obamas were convinced of "Ayers's proven abilities as a writer." Barack particularly liked the novelistic style of To Teach, a 1993 book by Ayers. Obama hoped to use a comparable style for his own family history. The problem was that although he had taped interviews with many of his relatives, he could not find it in himself to write the book.
Andersen documented Obama's blown advances, his futile escape to Bali, the growing financial and emotional pressure to finish a memoir he had started four years earlier.
The key sentence in Andersen's account is the one that I quoted on air almost verbatim: "These oral histories, along with his partial manuscript and a trunkload of notes were given to Ayers." Added Andersen, "Thanks to help from veteran writer Ayers, Barack would be able to submit a manuscript to his editors at Times Book."
I was also able to explain how up until the point of writing what Time Magazine called "the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician," Obama had written nothing of consequence. What he had written, said I, "as David points out," was a "muddled" article in a Columbia University weekly called Sundial, nothing at all as a legal scholar save for one case note at Harvard, and "one really half-assed article" on community organizing.
Remnick came out swinging, and as I knew, a person in studio has a huge tactical advantage over a person on the phone. The quotes that follow from Remnick are word-for-word. To get a true feel for what condescension sounds like in its purest, most undistilled form, please listen to the audio about 57 minutes in:
http://www.wgnradio.com/shows/ext720/wgnam-david-remnick-the-bridge-full-program,0,5756039.mp3file
"Mr. Castle [sic], this is David Remnick. Let's be clear about something. So on the basis of a book by a celebrity biographer of two unnamed sources -- who are those sources, by the way? Do you know?"
"He wouldn't tell me."
"Okay," said Remnick emphatically, as though his point had been confirmed.
"Do you reveal your unnamed sources?" I asked. Having read his book, I knew that Remnick used such sources, often for key details, and sometimes bogus ones -- like, for instance, the person known only as "aide" who misled Remnick on how Obama managed to write The Audacity of Hope.
"My book is filled with hundreds of named sources."
"But so is Andersen's."
"Yes, but you are not providing any sources here. So on the basis of two unnamed sources in a celebrity biographer's book that really has had very little currency and on your own notion that he uses the word 'eyes' a lot ... "
"Hold it right there," I said. "Hold it." Remnick had said something comparably slighting in his book. Those on the left are so used to saying such rubbish unchallenged that he must have forgotten where he was.
"I let you speak. Now you are going to let me respond."
"Go ahead," I conceded, trying not to make things awkward for my generous host.
"So it is hardly scientific," Remnick continued. "I find it deeply offensive. First of all, the history of literature is filled, filled with writers whose first books appear on the scene, and they are very good or excellent, or they are better."
This is true only to a degree. All great authors have a first book, usually very good, and always at the end of a paper trail strewn with other good writing. Obama's paper trail leads back to a literary junk pile. His sudden flowering is miraculous and unprecedented. Unfortunately, I did not have the chance to explain this on the air.
"I make no fantastic claims for his memoir," Remnick continued. "I don't come out of there claiming it to be Moby-Dick or Richard Wright or anything of the kind. I describe it as a very good book and no more and no less, but I examine it as a book that tells us something about Barack Obama, naturally, and something that comes out of the memoir tradition in African-American literature and American literature folklore."
Richard Wright is an African-American author. Note how Remnick feels the need to balance an undeniable classic by a white guy with a black guy of sufficiently lesser stature that he does not -- or cannot -- cite a Wright book. Affirmative action on the fly!
"So your theory, and it was a theory expounded as well by a much bigger microphone, by Rush Limbaugh, got a lot of currency on the internet, and I find it offensive on the minimal amount of proof you provided, in fact, on no proof at all that I could find convincing..."
"Well," I interjected.
"I am going to finish my thought here, okay?" Remnick scolded, sounding all the world like my second-grade nun. "There is something innately offensive about the notion that this man is incapable of writing a book." I should add that in his book, Remnick laments "the ugly pedigree" of my and Limbaugh's "racist insinuation."
"I am not saying he is stupid. I never did say that."
"But you are saying he is faking the book."
"Yes, I am absolutely saying that. He had help, serious help, and all evidence points in that direction." I must confess to being a little perturbed here. I plowed on.
"And when you reduce the twenty thousand or so words I did of textual comparison to saying 'something about eyes,' you are insulting me. And when you call me a racist, David, or when you call Limbaugh a racist, you are insulting the whole damn audience."
"The instances of Barack, uh...uh, Rush Limbaugh using racist language is so long as to beggar the imagination," Remnick answered, nearly averting a newsworthy Freudian slip. He then launched into an odd and disingenuous account of how he "has great respect for serious conservatives" who challenge Obama on his policies, the political equivalent of "some of my best friends are black."
"So why do you call me a racist?" I asked, cutting to the chase.
At this point, Rosenberg thanked me for calling in. If Remnick were gesturing wildly to kill the conversation, I would not have been surprised. Once he had imputed racism to a lesser mortal -- the most popular liberal hobby after recycling -- he had no other argument to make.
"I appreciate your having me on," I said to Rosenberg. "Sorry, but I don't like being called a racist, and that is part of the problem with the post-racial fraud we are living under now because all criticism is racist."
So the conversation ended. I don't get to talk to liberals much anymore.
Jack Cashill
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The best refutation of AJ's hero Jack Cashill by wingnut Ann Althouse of all people!:
Jack Cashill's Strange Notion that Bill Ayers wrote "Dreams Of My Father"
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Just for reference:
How Obama Thinks
Dinesh D'Souza, 09.27.10, 12:00 AM ET
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 Standard summarizes Obama's approach as omnipotence at home, impotence abroad.
The President's actions are so bizarre that they mystify his critics and supporters alike. Consider this headline from the Aug. 18, 2009 issue of the Wall Street Journal: "Obama Underwrites Offshore Drilling." Did you read that correctly? You did. The Administration supports offshore drilling--but drilling off the shores of Brazil. With Obama's backing, the U.S. Export-Import Bank offered $2 billion in loans and guarantees to Brazil's state-owned oil company Petrobras to finance exploration in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro--not so the oil ends up in the U.S. He is funding Brazilian exploration so that the oil can stay in Brazil.
More strange behavior: Obama's June 15, 2010 speech in response to the Gulf oil spill focused not on cleanup strategies but rather on the fact that Americans "consume more than 20% of the world's oil but have less than 2% of the world's resources." Obama railed on about "America's century-long addiction to fossil fuels." What does any of this have to do with the oil spill? Would the calamity have been less of a problem if America consumed a mere 10% of the world's resources?
The oddities go on and on. Obama's Administration has declared that even banks that want to repay their bailout money may be refused permission to do so. Only after the Obama team cleared a bank through the Fed's "stress test" was it eligible to give taxpayers their money back. Even then, declared Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, the Administration might force banks to keep the money.
The President continues to push for stimulus even though hundreds of billions of dollars in such funds seem to have done little. The unemployment rate when Obama took office in January 2009 was 7.7%; now it is 9.5%. Yet he wants to spend even more and is determined to foist the entire bill on Americans making $250,000 a year or more. The rich, Obama insists, aren't paying their "fair share." This by itself seems odd given that the top 1% of Americans pay 40% of all federal income taxes; the next 9% of income earners pay another 30%. So the top 10% pays 70% of the taxes; the bottom 40% pays close to nothing. This does indeed seem unfair--to the rich.
Obama's foreign policy is no less strange. He supports a $100 million mosque scheduled to be built near the site where terrorists in the name of Islam brought down the World Trade Center. Obama's rationale, that "our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable," seems utterly irrelevant to the issue of why the proposed Cordoba House should be constructed at Ground Zero.
Recently the London Times reported that the Obama Administration supported the conditional release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber convicted in connection with the deaths of 270 people, mostly Americans. This was an eye-opener because when Scotland released Megrahi from prison and sent him home to Libya in August 2009, the Obama Administration publicly and appropriately complained. The Times, however, obtained a letter the Obama Administration sent to Scotland a week before the event in which it said that releasing Megrahi on "compassionate grounds" was acceptable as long as he was kept in Scotland and would be "far preferable" to sending him back to Libya. Scottish officials interpreted this to mean that U.S. objections to Megrahi's release were "half-hearted." They released him to his home country, where he lives today as a free man.
One more anomaly: A few months ago nasa Chief Charles Bolden announced that from now on the primary mission of America's space agency would be to improve relations with the Muslim world. Come again? Bolden said he got the word directly from the President. "He wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science and math and engineering." Bolden added that the International Space Station was a model for nasa's future, since it was not just a U.S. operation but included the Russians and the Chinese. Obama's redirection of the agency caused consternation among former astronauts like Neil Armstrong and John Glenn, and even among the President's supporters: Most people think of nasa's job as one of landing on the moon and Mars and exploring other faraway destinations. Sure, we are for Islamic self-esteem, but what on earth was Obama up to here?
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. Here is a man who spent his formative years--the first 17 years of his life--off the American mainland, in Hawaii, Indonesia and Pakistan, with multiple subsequent journeys to Africa.
A good way to discern what motivates Obama is to ask a simple question: What is his dream? Is it the American dream? Is it Martin Luther King's dream? Or something else?
It is certainly not the American dream as conceived by the founders. They believed the nation was a "new order for the ages." A half-century later Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of America as creating "a distinct species of mankind." This is known as American exceptionalism. But when asked at a 2009 press conference whether he believed in this ideal, Obama said no. America, he suggested, is no more unique or exceptional than Britain or Greece or any other country.
Perhaps, then, Obama shares Martin Luther King's dream of a color-blind society. The President has benefited from that dream; he campaigned as a nonracial candidate, and many Americans voted for him because he represents the color-blind ideal. Even so, King's dream is not Obama's: The President never champions the idea of color-blindness or race-neutrality. This inaction is not merely tactical; the race issue simply isn't what drives Obama.
What then is Obama's dream? We don't have to speculate because the President tells us himself in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father. According to Obama, his dream is his father's dream. Notice that his title is not Dreams of My Father but rather Dreams from My Father. Obama isn't writing about his father's dreams; he is writing about the dreams he received from his father.
So who was Barack Obama Sr.? He was a Luo tribesman who grew up in Kenya and studied at Harvard. He was a polygamist who had, over the course of his lifetime, four wives and eight children. One of his sons, Mark Obama, has accused him of abuse and wife-beating. He was also a regular drunk driver who got into numerous accidents, killing a man in one and causing his own legs to be amputated due to injury in another. In 1982 he got drunk at a bar in Nairobi and drove into a tree, killing himself.
An odd choice, certainly, as an inspirational hero. But to his son, the elder Obama represented a great and noble cause, the cause of anticolonialism. Obama Sr. grew up during Africa's struggle to be free of European rule, and he was one of the early generation of Africans chosen to study in America and then to shape his country's future.
I know a great deal about anticolonialism, because I am a native of Mumbai, India. I am part of the first Indian generation to be born after my country's independence from the British. Anticolonialism was the rallying cry of Third World politics for much of the second half of the 20th century. To most Americans, however, anticolonialism is an unfamiliar idea, so let me explain it.
Anticolonialism is the doctrine that rich countries of the West got rich by invading, occupying and looting poor countries of Asia, Africa and South America. As one of Obama's acknowledged intellectual influences, Frantz Fanon, wrote in The Wretched of the Earth, "The well-being and progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians and the yellow races."
Anticolonialists hold that even when countries secure political independence they remain economically dependent on their former captors. This dependence is called neocolonialism, a term defined by the African statesman Kwame Nkrumah (1909--72) in his book Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. Nkrumah, Ghana's first president, writes that poor countries may be nominally free, but they continue to be manipulated from abroad by powerful corporate and plutocratic elites. These forces of neocolonialism oppress not only Third World people but also citizens in their own countries. Obviously the solution is to resist and overthrow the oppressors. This was the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. and many in his generation, including many of my own relatives in India.
Obama Sr. was an economist, and in 1965 he published an important article in the East Africa Journal called "Problems Facing Our Socialism." Obama Sr. wasn't a doctrinaire socialist; rather, he saw state appropriation of wealth as a necessary means to achieve the anticolonial objective of taking resources away from the foreign looters and restoring them to the people of Africa. For Obama Sr. this was an issue of national autonomy. "Is it the African who owns this country? If he does, then why should he not control the economic means of growth in this country?"
As he put it, "We need to eliminate power structures that have been built through excessive accumulation so that not only a few individuals shall control a vast magnitude of resources as is the case now." The senior Obama proposed that the state confiscate private land and raise taxes with no upper limit. In fact, he insisted that "theoretically there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100% of income so long as the people get benefits from the government commensurate with their income which is taxed."
Remarkably, President Obama, who knows his father's history very well, has never mentioned his father's article. Even more remarkably, there has been virtually no reporting on a document that seems directly relevant to what the junior Obama is doing in the White House.
While the senior Obama called for Africa to free itself from the neocolonial influence of Europe and specifically Britain, he knew when he came to America in 1959 that the global balance of power was shifting. Even then, he recognized what has become a new tenet of anticolonialist ideology: Today's neocolonial leader is not Europe but America. As the late Palestinian scholar Edward Said--who was one of Obama's teachers at Columbia University--wrote in Culture and Imperialism, "The United States has replaced the earlier great empires and is the dominant outside force."
From the anticolonial perspective, American imperialism is on a rampage. For a while, U.S. power was checked by the Soviet Union, but since the end of the Cold War, America has been the sole superpower. Moreover, 9/11 provided the occasion for America to invade and occupy two countries, Iraq and Afghanistan, and also to seek political and economic domination in the same way the French and the British empires once did. So in the anticolonial view, America is now the rogue elephant that subjugates and tramples the people of the world.
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.
For Obama, the solutions are simple. He must work to wring the neocolonialism out of America and the West. And here is where our anticolonial understanding of Obama really takes off, because it provides a vital key to explaining not only his major policy actions but also the little details that no other theory can adequately account for.
Why support oil drilling off the coast of Brazil but not in America? Obama believes that the West uses a disproportionate share of the world's energy resources, so he wants neocolonial America to have less and the former colonized countries to have more. More broadly, his proposal for carbon taxes has little to do with whether the planet is getting warmer or colder; it is simply a way to penalize, and therefore reduce, America's carbon consumption. Both as a U.S. Senator and in his speech, as President, to the United Nations, Obama has proposed that the West massively subsidize energy production in the developing world.
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.
If Obama shares his father's anticolonial crusade, that would explain why he wants people who are already paying close to 50% of their income in overall taxes to pay even more. The anticolonialist believes that since the rich have prospered at the expense of others, their wealth doesn't really belong to them; therefore whatever can be extracted from them is automatically just. Recall what Obama Sr. said in his 1965 paper: There is no tax rate too high, and even a 100% rate is justified under certain circumstances.
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.
Finally, nasa. No explanation other than anticolonialism makes sense of Obama's curious mandate to convert a space agency into a Muslim and international outreach. We can see how well our theory works by recalling the moon landing of Apollo 11 in 1969. "One small step for man," Neil Armstrong said. "One giant leap for mankind."
But that's not how the rest of the world saw it. I was 8 years old at the time and living in my native India. I remember my grandfather telling me about the great race between America and Russia to put a man on the moon. Clearly America had won, and this was one giant leap not for mankind but for the U.S. If Obama shares this view, it's no wonder he wants to blunt nasa's space program, to divert it from a symbol of American greatness into a more modest public relations program.
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!"
The climax of Obama's narrative is when he goes to Kenya and weeps at his father's grave. It is riveting: "When my tears were finally spent," he writes, "I felt a calmness wash over me. I felt the circle finally close. I realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America--the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I'd felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I'd witnessed in Chicago--all of it was connected with this small piece of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin. The pain that I felt was my father's pain."
In an eerie conclusion, Obama writes that "I sat at my father's grave and spoke to him through Africa's red soil." In a sense, through the earth itself, he communes with his father and receives his father's spirit. Obama takes on his father's struggle, not by recovering his body but by embracing his cause. He decides that where Obama Sr. failed, he will succeed. Obama Sr.'s hatred of the colonial system becomes Obama Jr.'s hatred; his botched attempt to set the world right defines his son's objective. Through a kind of sacramental rite at the family tomb, the father's struggle becomes the son's birthright.
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, the president of the King's College in New York City, is the author of the forthcoming book The Roots of Obama's Rage (Regnery Publishing).
How Obama Thinks
Dinesh D'Souza, 09.27.10, 12:00 AM ET
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 Standard summarizes Obama's approach as omnipotence at home, impotence abroad.
The President's actions are so bizarre that they mystify his critics and supporters alike. Consider this headline from the Aug. 18, 2009 issue of the Wall Street Journal: "Obama Underwrites Offshore Drilling." Did you read that correctly? You did. The Administration supports offshore drilling--but drilling off the shores of Brazil. With Obama's backing, the U.S. Export-Import Bank offered $2 billion in loans and guarantees to Brazil's state-owned oil company Petrobras to finance exploration in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro--not so the oil ends up in the U.S. He is funding Brazilian exploration so that the oil can stay in Brazil.
More strange behavior: Obama's June 15, 2010 speech in response to the Gulf oil spill focused not on cleanup strategies but rather on the fact that Americans "consume more than 20% of the world's oil but have less than 2% of the world's resources." Obama railed on about "America's century-long addiction to fossil fuels." What does any of this have to do with the oil spill? Would the calamity have been less of a problem if America consumed a mere 10% of the world's resources?
The oddities go on and on. Obama's Administration has declared that even banks that want to repay their bailout money may be refused permission to do so. Only after the Obama team cleared a bank through the Fed's "stress test" was it eligible to give taxpayers their money back. Even then, declared Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, the Administration might force banks to keep the money.
The President continues to push for stimulus even though hundreds of billions of dollars in such funds seem to have done little. The unemployment rate when Obama took office in January 2009 was 7.7%; now it is 9.5%. Yet he wants to spend even more and is determined to foist the entire bill on Americans making $250,000 a year or more. The rich, Obama insists, aren't paying their "fair share." This by itself seems odd given that the top 1% of Americans pay 40% of all federal income taxes; the next 9% of income earners pay another 30%. So the top 10% pays 70% of the taxes; the bottom 40% pays close to nothing. This does indeed seem unfair--to the rich.
Obama's foreign policy is no less strange. He supports a $100 million mosque scheduled to be built near the site where terrorists in the name of Islam brought down the World Trade Center. Obama's rationale, that "our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable," seems utterly irrelevant to the issue of why the proposed Cordoba House should be constructed at Ground Zero.
Recently the London Times reported that the Obama Administration supported the conditional release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber convicted in connection with the deaths of 270 people, mostly Americans. This was an eye-opener because when Scotland released Megrahi from prison and sent him home to Libya in August 2009, the Obama Administration publicly and appropriately complained. The Times, however, obtained a letter the Obama Administration sent to Scotland a week before the event in which it said that releasing Megrahi on "compassionate grounds" was acceptable as long as he was kept in Scotland and would be "far preferable" to sending him back to Libya. Scottish officials interpreted this to mean that U.S. objections to Megrahi's release were "half-hearted." They released him to his home country, where he lives today as a free man.
One more anomaly: A few months ago nasa Chief Charles Bolden announced that from now on the primary mission of America's space agency would be to improve relations with the Muslim world. Come again? Bolden said he got the word directly from the President. "He wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science and math and engineering." Bolden added that the International Space Station was a model for nasa's future, since it was not just a U.S. operation but included the Russians and the Chinese. Obama's redirection of the agency caused consternation among former astronauts like Neil Armstrong and John Glenn, and even among the President's supporters: Most people think of nasa's job as one of landing on the moon and Mars and exploring other faraway destinations. Sure, we are for Islamic self-esteem, but what on earth was Obama up to here?
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. Here is a man who spent his formative years--the first 17 years of his life--off the American mainland, in Hawaii, Indonesia and Pakistan, with multiple subsequent journeys to Africa.
A good way to discern what motivates Obama is to ask a simple question: What is his dream? Is it the American dream? Is it Martin Luther King's dream? Or something else?
It is certainly not the American dream as conceived by the founders. They believed the nation was a "new order for the ages." A half-century later Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of America as creating "a distinct species of mankind." This is known as American exceptionalism. But when asked at a 2009 press conference whether he believed in this ideal, Obama said no. America, he suggested, is no more unique or exceptional than Britain or Greece or any other country.
Perhaps, then, Obama shares Martin Luther King's dream of a color-blind society. The President has benefited from that dream; he campaigned as a nonracial candidate, and many Americans voted for him because he represents the color-blind ideal. Even so, King's dream is not Obama's: The President never champions the idea of color-blindness or race-neutrality. This inaction is not merely tactical; the race issue simply isn't what drives Obama.
What then is Obama's dream? We don't have to speculate because the President tells us himself in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father. According to Obama, his dream is his father's dream. Notice that his title is not Dreams of My Father but rather Dreams from My Father. Obama isn't writing about his father's dreams; he is writing about the dreams he received from his father.
So who was Barack Obama Sr.? He was a Luo tribesman who grew up in Kenya and studied at Harvard. He was a polygamist who had, over the course of his lifetime, four wives and eight children. One of his sons, Mark Obama, has accused him of abuse and wife-beating. He was also a regular drunk driver who got into numerous accidents, killing a man in one and causing his own legs to be amputated due to injury in another. In 1982 he got drunk at a bar in Nairobi and drove into a tree, killing himself.
An odd choice, certainly, as an inspirational hero. But to his son, the elder Obama represented a great and noble cause, the cause of anticolonialism. Obama Sr. grew up during Africa's struggle to be free of European rule, and he was one of the early generation of Africans chosen to study in America and then to shape his country's future.
I know a great deal about anticolonialism, because I am a native of Mumbai, India. I am part of the first Indian generation to be born after my country's independence from the British. Anticolonialism was the rallying cry of Third World politics for much of the second half of the 20th century. To most Americans, however, anticolonialism is an unfamiliar idea, so let me explain it.
Anticolonialism is the doctrine that rich countries of the West got rich by invading, occupying and looting poor countries of Asia, Africa and South America. As one of Obama's acknowledged intellectual influences, Frantz Fanon, wrote in The Wretched of the Earth, "The well-being and progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians and the yellow races."
Anticolonialists hold that even when countries secure political independence they remain economically dependent on their former captors. This dependence is called neocolonialism, a term defined by the African statesman Kwame Nkrumah (1909--72) in his book Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. Nkrumah, Ghana's first president, writes that poor countries may be nominally free, but they continue to be manipulated from abroad by powerful corporate and plutocratic elites. These forces of neocolonialism oppress not only Third World people but also citizens in their own countries. Obviously the solution is to resist and overthrow the oppressors. This was the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. and many in his generation, including many of my own relatives in India.
Obama Sr. was an economist, and in 1965 he published an important article in the East Africa Journal called "Problems Facing Our Socialism." Obama Sr. wasn't a doctrinaire socialist; rather, he saw state appropriation of wealth as a necessary means to achieve the anticolonial objective of taking resources away from the foreign looters and restoring them to the people of Africa. For Obama Sr. this was an issue of national autonomy. "Is it the African who owns this country? If he does, then why should he not control the economic means of growth in this country?"
As he put it, "We need to eliminate power structures that have been built through excessive accumulation so that not only a few individuals shall control a vast magnitude of resources as is the case now." The senior Obama proposed that the state confiscate private land and raise taxes with no upper limit. In fact, he insisted that "theoretically there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100% of income so long as the people get benefits from the government commensurate with their income which is taxed."
Remarkably, President Obama, who knows his father's history very well, has never mentioned his father's article. Even more remarkably, there has been virtually no reporting on a document that seems directly relevant to what the junior Obama is doing in the White House.
While the senior Obama called for Africa to free itself from the neocolonial influence of Europe and specifically Britain, he knew when he came to America in 1959 that the global balance of power was shifting. Even then, he recognized what has become a new tenet of anticolonialist ideology: Today's neocolonial leader is not Europe but America. As the late Palestinian scholar Edward Said--who was one of Obama's teachers at Columbia University--wrote in Culture and Imperialism, "The United States has replaced the earlier great empires and is the dominant outside force."
From the anticolonial perspective, American imperialism is on a rampage. For a while, U.S. power was checked by the Soviet Union, but since the end of the Cold War, America has been the sole superpower. Moreover, 9/11 provided the occasion for America to invade and occupy two countries, Iraq and Afghanistan, and also to seek political and economic domination in the same way the French and the British empires once did. So in the anticolonial view, America is now the rogue elephant that subjugates and tramples the people of the world.
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.
For Obama, the solutions are simple. He must work to wring the neocolonialism out of America and the West. And here is where our anticolonial understanding of Obama really takes off, because it provides a vital key to explaining not only his major policy actions but also the little details that no other theory can adequately account for.
Why support oil drilling off the coast of Brazil but not in America? Obama believes that the West uses a disproportionate share of the world's energy resources, so he wants neocolonial America to have less and the former colonized countries to have more. More broadly, his proposal for carbon taxes has little to do with whether the planet is getting warmer or colder; it is simply a way to penalize, and therefore reduce, America's carbon consumption. Both as a U.S. Senator and in his speech, as President, to the United Nations, Obama has proposed that the West massively subsidize energy production in the developing world.
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.
If Obama shares his father's anticolonial crusade, that would explain why he wants people who are already paying close to 50% of their income in overall taxes to pay even more. The anticolonialist believes that since the rich have prospered at the expense of others, their wealth doesn't really belong to them; therefore whatever can be extracted from them is automatically just. Recall what Obama Sr. said in his 1965 paper: There is no tax rate too high, and even a 100% rate is justified under certain circumstances.
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.
Finally, nasa. No explanation other than anticolonialism makes sense of Obama's curious mandate to convert a space agency into a Muslim and international outreach. We can see how well our theory works by recalling the moon landing of Apollo 11 in 1969. "One small step for man," Neil Armstrong said. "One giant leap for mankind."
But that's not how the rest of the world saw it. I was 8 years old at the time and living in my native India. I remember my grandfather telling me about the great race between America and Russia to put a man on the moon. Clearly America had won, and this was one giant leap not for mankind but for the U.S. If Obama shares this view, it's no wonder he wants to blunt nasa's space program, to divert it from a symbol of American greatness into a more modest public relations program.
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!"
The climax of Obama's narrative is when he goes to Kenya and weeps at his father's grave. It is riveting: "When my tears were finally spent," he writes, "I felt a calmness wash over me. I felt the circle finally close. I realized that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America--the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I'd felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I'd witnessed in Chicago--all of it was connected with this small piece of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the color of my skin. The pain that I felt was my father's pain."
In an eerie conclusion, Obama writes that "I sat at my father's grave and spoke to him through Africa's red soil." In a sense, through the earth itself, he communes with his father and receives his father's spirit. Obama takes on his father's struggle, not by recovering his body but by embracing his cause. He decides that where Obama Sr. failed, he will succeed. Obama Sr.'s hatred of the colonial system becomes Obama Jr.'s hatred; his botched attempt to set the world right defines his son's objective. Through a kind of sacramental rite at the family tomb, the father's struggle becomes the son's birthright.
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, the president of the King's College in New York City, is the author of the forthcoming book The Roots of Obama's Rage (Regnery Publishing).
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The Real Roots of Obama's Rage
By Jack Cashill
On Monday morning of this week, after reviewing my book proofs and shipping them off to Simon & Schuster, I picked up a copy of Dinesh D'Souza's new book, The Rage of Obama's Roots, and read it until I finished. Happily, it is a short book.
In my own forthcoming book, Deconstructing Obama, I ask two basic questions: one is whether Barack Obama wrote the books and speeches penned under his name, and two is whether the stories he tells therein are true. Like D'Souza, I focus on the most important work in Obama's canon: his celebrated 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father.
To make his thesis work -- namely that Obama "embraced his father's ideals and decided to live out the script of his father's unfulfilled life" -- D'Souza must presume that the answer to both these questions is "yes." It is not. As I prove beyond any reasonable doubt, the answer to both questions is an unequivocal "no."
What undermines D'Souza's otherwise worthy book is that he had to ignore all the easily accessible research I and others have done on this subject to arrive at his thesis. In so doing, alas, he validates one of the sub-themes that runs through my own book: the self-destructive myopia of the "respectable" conservative media.
D'Souza centers his book on the phenomenon of anti-colonialism -- a potentially toxic mix of socialism, anti-imperialism, and anti-Americanism. This is a subject he knows well both from his studies and from his life. Born the same year as Obama, D'Souza grew up in the suburbs of Mumbai and can relate to Obama's cosmopolitanism on a visceral level.
D'Souza argues credibly that Barack Obama, Sr. was "first and foremost" an anti-colonialist and that his son is, too. Both assertions are true enough. Where the argument breaks down is in D'Souza's insistence that "through an incredible osmosis, [Barack Sr.] was able to transmit his ideology to his son living in America."
Like Procrustes, the mythological innkeeper who stretched his victims or severed their limbs to make them fit his iron bed, D'Souza whacks away at the facts to make his "incredible osmosis" theory work.
The severing begins with the story of Obama's origins. In his "essence," D'Souza explains, Obama was "his father's son." In his retelling, Obama's mother, Ann Dunham, served largely as the vehicle through which the absent Obama exercised his will on the young Obama, she being "Obama Sr.'s first convert" to anti-colonialism.
To make this storyline credible, D'Souza has to embrace the narrative that Obama rolled out in Dreams and amplified during his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.
As Obama told the conventioneers, his father grew up in Kenya "herding goats." His mother he traced to Kansas, as he always did. "My parents shared not only an improbable love," said Obama. "They shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation."*
Like Obama, D'Souza sustains this narrative at the expense of the facts, and he does so in several salient ways. First, he tells the reader only of Ann's "white-bread upbringing in the Midwest." He neglects to tell us that Ann and her parents moved to the Seattle area when she was twelve and remained there until she had completed her senior year of high school.
Next, to make the conversion story convincing, D'Souza suppresses Ann's radical roots. The reader does not learn that Ann felt most at home in "anarchy alley," a wing of Mercer Island High where the school's progressive teachers held forth, or that she attended a Unitarian church affectionately known as "the little Red church on the hill," or that she hung out in Seattle's coffee shops talking jazz, foreign films, and liberal politics.
Finally, and most critically, D'Souza has to accept the Obama-generated myth that the happy little family lived together until Obama was two, whereupon his father reluctantly departed for Harvard.*
As is easily proven, Ann enrolled for night classes at the University of Washington that began on August 19, 1961, just fifteen days after the presumed date of Obama's birth. In June 1962, while Ann and her ten-month old baby were still in Seattle, Barack Sr. left for a grand tour of mainland universities on his triumphant way to Harvard. The Honolulu Advertiser did a story on the same.*
In short, the little Obama family never lived together. It is likely that Ann and Barack Sr. never really dated, let alone married in any meaningful way. It is less likely, though possible, that Barack Sr. was not the real biological father. D'Souza buries the verifiable and fails to explore the possible. All of it challenges his thesis.
...
*snicker*
By Jack Cashill
On Monday morning of this week, after reviewing my book proofs and shipping them off to Simon & Schuster, I picked up a copy of Dinesh D'Souza's new book, The Rage of Obama's Roots, and read it until I finished. Happily, it is a short book.
In my own forthcoming book, Deconstructing Obama, I ask two basic questions: one is whether Barack Obama wrote the books and speeches penned under his name, and two is whether the stories he tells therein are true. Like D'Souza, I focus on the most important work in Obama's canon: his celebrated 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father.
To make his thesis work -- namely that Obama "embraced his father's ideals and decided to live out the script of his father's unfulfilled life" -- D'Souza must presume that the answer to both these questions is "yes." It is not. As I prove beyond any reasonable doubt, the answer to both questions is an unequivocal "no."
What undermines D'Souza's otherwise worthy book is that he had to ignore all the easily accessible research I and others have done on this subject to arrive at his thesis. In so doing, alas, he validates one of the sub-themes that runs through my own book: the self-destructive myopia of the "respectable" conservative media.
D'Souza centers his book on the phenomenon of anti-colonialism -- a potentially toxic mix of socialism, anti-imperialism, and anti-Americanism. This is a subject he knows well both from his studies and from his life. Born the same year as Obama, D'Souza grew up in the suburbs of Mumbai and can relate to Obama's cosmopolitanism on a visceral level.
D'Souza argues credibly that Barack Obama, Sr. was "first and foremost" an anti-colonialist and that his son is, too. Both assertions are true enough. Where the argument breaks down is in D'Souza's insistence that "through an incredible osmosis, [Barack Sr.] was able to transmit his ideology to his son living in America."
Like Procrustes, the mythological innkeeper who stretched his victims or severed their limbs to make them fit his iron bed, D'Souza whacks away at the facts to make his "incredible osmosis" theory work.
The severing begins with the story of Obama's origins. In his "essence," D'Souza explains, Obama was "his father's son." In his retelling, Obama's mother, Ann Dunham, served largely as the vehicle through which the absent Obama exercised his will on the young Obama, she being "Obama Sr.'s first convert" to anti-colonialism.
To make this storyline credible, D'Souza has to embrace the narrative that Obama rolled out in Dreams and amplified during his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.
As Obama told the conventioneers, his father grew up in Kenya "herding goats." His mother he traced to Kansas, as he always did. "My parents shared not only an improbable love," said Obama. "They shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation."*
Like Obama, D'Souza sustains this narrative at the expense of the facts, and he does so in several salient ways. First, he tells the reader only of Ann's "white-bread upbringing in the Midwest." He neglects to tell us that Ann and her parents moved to the Seattle area when she was twelve and remained there until she had completed her senior year of high school.
Next, to make the conversion story convincing, D'Souza suppresses Ann's radical roots. The reader does not learn that Ann felt most at home in "anarchy alley," a wing of Mercer Island High where the school's progressive teachers held forth, or that she attended a Unitarian church affectionately known as "the little Red church on the hill," or that she hung out in Seattle's coffee shops talking jazz, foreign films, and liberal politics.
Finally, and most critically, D'Souza has to accept the Obama-generated myth that the happy little family lived together until Obama was two, whereupon his father reluctantly departed for Harvard.*
As is easily proven, Ann enrolled for night classes at the University of Washington that began on August 19, 1961, just fifteen days after the presumed date of Obama's birth. In June 1962, while Ann and her ten-month old baby were still in Seattle, Barack Sr. left for a grand tour of mainland universities on his triumphant way to Harvard. The Honolulu Advertiser did a story on the same.*
In short, the little Obama family never lived together. It is likely that Ann and Barack Sr. never really dated, let alone married in any meaningful way. It is less likely, though possible, that Barack Sr. was not the real biological father. D'Souza buries the verifiable and fails to explore the possible. All of it challenges his thesis.
...
*snicker*
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In September 2009, in his otherwise Obama-friendly book, Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage, celebrity biographer Christopher Andersen confirmed my thesis that former terrorist Bill Ayers played a major role in the writing of Dreams. Andersen based his account on two obviously well-informed sources from Obama's Hyde Park neighborhood. Not a word on this subject makes it into D'Souza's book.
In his two-page synopsis of the Ayers-Obama relationship, D'Souza describes the pair as "fellow anti-colonial warriors" and freely admits that in Ayers's 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days, "[t]he anti-colonial themes jump out at you."
And yet, while conceding Obama's lack of "comprehensive knowledge" on the subject, D'Souza refuses to explore whether Ayers might have been the source of what knowledge he did have. The reason seems obvious enough. If Ayers provided the anti-colonial overlay to Dreams, as I have argued, then D'Souza's thesis is shot.
Ayers, in fact, has been schooling himself in anti-colonialism's many permutations for nearly fifty years. What is more, he has been a respected peer of Obama's acknowledged mentors. The preeminent anti-colonialist Edward Said wrote a blurb for Fugitive Days. Said's fellow traveler, Rashid Khalidi, gave Ayers top credit for helping him edit his book, Resurrecting Empire.
D'Souza also slights Ayers on the subject of rage. He attributes Obama's presumed anger to the imperialist world's treatment of his father. The actual villains being dead, writes D'Souza, "the rage takes a different form and settles on a different target."
Other than in the pages of Dreams, however, Obama has never seemed particularly enraged. Many of his friends have commented on the disparity between the angry Obama of the memoir and the amiable Obama of real life.
Obama surely imported the brooding Telemachus imagery of Dreams from Ayers's inexplicably angry life. In Fugitive Days, "rage" rules. Ayers speaks of "rage" the way that Eskimos do of snow -- in so many varieties, so often, that he feels the need to qualify it. He tells of how his "rage got started," how it evolved into an "uncontrollable rage -- fierce frenzy of fire and lava," and how it climaxed in the famed "Days of Rage."
It gets worse. So fixed is D'Souza on the image of an angry Obama avenging his father's failures that he misinterprets the book's climactic scene. As told in Dreams, Obama finds himself at the burial site of his father and grandfather. "For a long time I sat between the two graves and wept," reads the text. D'Souza takes Obama at his word and editorializes, "It is here that Obama takes on the father's struggle."
This is all wrong. In his book, The Bridge, Obama-fan David Remnick concedes that Dreams is not to be taken at face value. He calls it a "mixture of verifiable fact, recollection, recreation, invention, and artful shaping." The grave scene registers high on the invention scale.
As I have argued in these pages, Ayers has imposed an Homeric structure on Obama's life. Obama's trip to Kenya and the burial site serves the same purpose that Odysseus' trip to the underworld serves: a chance to reconcile with the spirits of the past.
In his two-page synopsis of the Ayers-Obama relationship, D'Souza describes the pair as "fellow anti-colonial warriors" and freely admits that in Ayers's 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days, "[t]he anti-colonial themes jump out at you."
And yet, while conceding Obama's lack of "comprehensive knowledge" on the subject, D'Souza refuses to explore whether Ayers might have been the source of what knowledge he did have. The reason seems obvious enough. If Ayers provided the anti-colonial overlay to Dreams, as I have argued, then D'Souza's thesis is shot.
Ayers, in fact, has been schooling himself in anti-colonialism's many permutations for nearly fifty years. What is more, he has been a respected peer of Obama's acknowledged mentors. The preeminent anti-colonialist Edward Said wrote a blurb for Fugitive Days. Said's fellow traveler, Rashid Khalidi, gave Ayers top credit for helping him edit his book, Resurrecting Empire.
D'Souza also slights Ayers on the subject of rage. He attributes Obama's presumed anger to the imperialist world's treatment of his father. The actual villains being dead, writes D'Souza, "the rage takes a different form and settles on a different target."
Other than in the pages of Dreams, however, Obama has never seemed particularly enraged. Many of his friends have commented on the disparity between the angry Obama of the memoir and the amiable Obama of real life.
Obama surely imported the brooding Telemachus imagery of Dreams from Ayers's inexplicably angry life. In Fugitive Days, "rage" rules. Ayers speaks of "rage" the way that Eskimos do of snow -- in so many varieties, so often, that he feels the need to qualify it. He tells of how his "rage got started," how it evolved into an "uncontrollable rage -- fierce frenzy of fire and lava," and how it climaxed in the famed "Days of Rage."
It gets worse. So fixed is D'Souza on the image of an angry Obama avenging his father's failures that he misinterprets the book's climactic scene. As told in Dreams, Obama finds himself at the burial site of his father and grandfather. "For a long time I sat between the two graves and wept," reads the text. D'Souza takes Obama at his word and editorializes, "It is here that Obama takes on the father's struggle."
This is all wrong. In his book, The Bridge, Obama-fan David Remnick concedes that Dreams is not to be taken at face value. He calls it a "mixture of verifiable fact, recollection, recreation, invention, and artful shaping." The grave scene registers high on the invention scale.
As I have argued in these pages, Ayers has imposed an Homeric structure on Obama's life. Obama's trip to Kenya and the burial site serves the same purpose that Odysseus' trip to the underworld serves: a chance to reconcile with the spirits of the past.
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