Personal Asides: One-Liner Musings as I Shave…Finally Somebody Has Obama Figured Out—D’Souza.

                                    One-Liner Thoughts. 

            I. That slashing  satirist of conservatism beloved to the elites (he plays a dumb right wing commentator on Comedy Central), Steven Colbert has made a roaring horse’s arse of himself before House Judiciary, was asked to leave by  Chairman John Conyers, panned by Majority Leader Steny Hoyer…but praised by Speaker Nancy Pelosi —even though the arch-liberal media won’t acknowledge it was a humiliation. 

           2. Jesse, Jr.’s bringing his white female “social acquaintance” to Chicago for a romp while a friend paid the airline fares illustrates that Alderman Sandi isn’t around and  all but officially lives in D. C.—but her courageous yet heart-rending story to Sneed signifies pompous JJ is toast (maybe ultimately even in his own district: GOP’s Rev. Isaac Hayes gains attention), something even Daddy JJ can’t change.  

       3.  As the list of scarily inept black candidates for mayor grows i.e. Danny Davis, Ricky Hendon, Carol Mosley Braun whites in  The Squid fearing Chicago’s future is Detroit privately vow to ensure that Rahm wins what will in effect be Daley’s 7^th term no matter the cursing and lousy personality.  

      4. Underscoring how the smoke of Satan continues to swirl over  the Church,  as soon as Benedict XVI left England, the unofficial primate of England and Wales Archbishop Vincent Nichols says that the Church in  Britain is “nuanced” and won’t oppose legislation for civil unions, tantamount to One Big Catholic Shrug. 

      5   In sharp contrast, Mexico City Cardinal Iniguez Juan Sandoval is in danger of going to jail for condemning homosexuality which is banned by city’s and Mexico’s federal “human rights” law—a premonition of what could come here via Political Correctness (attn. Ms. Marin).  

      6. The New York Times prepares a sex hit on Mad Men Don Draper look-alike John Boehner who’s supposedly sleeping with female printing industry lobbyist, a story identical to one they “uncovered” but failed to prove on McCain two years ago with a woman lobbyist (upcoming elections being purely coincidental, of course). 

      7. The red hot Chicago story with great human interest involving Chris Kennedy, son of the murdered Robert, denying Billy Ayres emeritus status because Ayres dedicated a book to Sirhan Sirhan was featured the other day-- and properly so—on the front page by  the Sun-Times…in contrast to the single column on page 11 in the sleepy Tribune showing why one paper is doing relatively well and the other is in bankruptcy: awful story placement. 


8.  Congratulations to Rev.-Sen. James Meeks for paying the cost of getting congregants to marry, who had been fornicating together a long time—showing  other churches (including my own Catholic one) an example of what a truly Christian inner-city pastor can do if he has the guts (attn. Fr. Pfleger and the Chancery)

9.  After giving lip-service honor to Arizona Cardinals’  safety Pat

Tillman  who died a hero’s death in Iraq for  turning down a $3.6 million contract to become an Army Ranger, The Sun-Times’ Rick Telander honed his Lefty axe Sunday arguing  that Tillman has been used as p. r. fodder by the military and the  hateful George W. Bush “regime” for a “dubious war”--echoing John Jota Leanos, assistant professor of “Chicana and Chicano  Studies” at Arizona State…Telander’s column rehashing his favorite Democratic party themes under the guise of “sports” commentary--prompting this question: Why doesn’t the paper either transfer Telander as an “opinion columnist” to join Neil Steinberg or give him leave to join The Nation magazine where he belongs?  

         D’Souza’s Analysis: Obama’s “Anti-Colonial” Rap on the U.S.  

           A cover article in Forbes seems to finally have pulled the psychological mask from the hidden face of the most mysterious president we have ever elected—Barack Obama. 

       A number of people, me included, tried earlier. As one who met and interviewed him several times when he was a state senator, I think I came fairly close by calling him an emotional 3^rd World Alien: far removed from the American people.   I said it is clear that of all our presidents, this one is not a patriot.  

         I reasoned his seeming apartness may have resulted from his being abandoned by two fathers. Others have speculated widely about his Marxist-leaning economics as well as spending much of his youth in Indonesia. Close but no cigar.  

     A good many believe the alienation is because he’s a closet Muslim and 22% of Americans think that to be the case.  Again: almost there but not quite.  Last week he finally went to the historic church that George Washington faithfully attended in an effort, I’m sure, to shake the Muslim connection.   But he later un-did the good effect by quoting from the Declaration of Independence to the Hispanic Caucus and leaving out the words “their Creator” as the author of “certain inalienable rights including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”  Dropping “the Creator”: Accidental or purposeful?  

         Finally, Dinesh D’Souza, to my mind at least, hits it on the nose.   

           D’Souza, 49, is a native of India who has been writing books for dozens of years.  He has a distinguished academic pedigree, was a scholar at the Hoover Institution.  I met him when he was editor of the Catholic magazine Crisis.   Then he was a Catholic but left to become an evangelical Protestant to share that religion with his evangelical wife and seems to shrug off the difference (which disappoints me but which for the purpose of this column we’ll ignore). 

          He is president of The King’s College of New York, a liberal arts college serving evangelical Christians.  He’s written a  number of best-sellers including The End of Racism, Illiberal Education, What’s So Great About Christianity? Life After Death: The Evidence and is an excellent debater having crossed swords with atheist cum liberal icon Chris Hitchens on the existence of God and with the liberal TV satirist Stephen Colbert on “The Colbert Report” (Comedy Central).   Anyone who can trade barbs and witticisms with Colbert and walk away with his head still on his shoulders has my undying admiration.  

         The article, entitled “How Obama Thinks,” is a kind of introduction  to D’Souza’s forthcoming book The Roots of Obama’s Rage.  The interesting thing is that D’Souza has deduced his reason for alienation by just carefully re-reading Obama’s book Dreams From My Father. I read it a long time ago and didn’t finish it—but clearly I should have. 

           The Forbes article touched a nerve with the White House like a dentist’s drill which sent it reeling.  Of all the thousands of articles written  about Obama pro-and-con, this was the one that pushed beyond the soft pulp and struck a main nerve with so much effect that Press Secretary Robert Gibbs reacted with excruciating pain and anger. It was, Gibbs said, “a shameful and disgusting attack.” He met with Forbes’  Washington editor to express his outrage.  Gibbs citedThe Columbia Journalism Review, a liberal review published by Columbia University in declaring D’Souza’s article out-of-bounds.   One wouldn’t expect a publication from Columbia, one of Obama’s alma maters, to do anything different.   

            Now, after all this, what does D’Souza say?  

                                   Obama’s Non-American Mindset.  

            Meticulously he lays out Obama’s mind-set. Obama has set himself  up at least in his mind as a major U. S. critic of the world in favor of the have-nots.   Items:  

             1. While our own industry cried out for more oil drilling rights in 2009, initially Obama cavalierly supported offshore drilling all right—but off the shores of Brazil, supporting a U. S. Export-Import bank’s proposal to fund oil exploration there with the proviso that the oil stays in Brazil.  What kind of weird nonsense is that coming from a U. S. president?   Then when our own Gulf of Mexico oil spill happened, his first words were not about cleaning up the mess but lambasting “America’s centuries-long addiction to fossil fuels” adding caustically that we “consume more than 20% of the world’s oil but have less than 2% of the world’s resources.”  He still hasn’t relented on off-shore drilling on “safety” grounds neglecting the economy of the country and its gulf states. What did  that guilt-ridden pro-3^rd World obsession have to do with the Gulf oil spill?     

2. He seems congenitally unable to understand that our society has

already penalized the wealthy but demands it shell out more.   He rushed the $800 billion stimulus bill through immediately after his inauguration when joblessness stood at 7.7% saying that only by doing so would we be able to hold unemployment under 8% and the rich should be able to pay for it.   It is now 9.5%.  But his response is to soak the rich even more, charging that Americans earning more than $250,000 aren’t paying “their fair share.”  But the top 10% shells out 70% and the bottom 40% contribute minimally to the tax proceeds.  

3. Here’s a strange one. Obama’s appointment to head NASA, the

space agency, African American Charles Bolden has said that Obama told him at the time of Bolden’s appointment that Bolden’s major goal should be to improve our relations with the Muslim world so that the Muslims can feel good about themselves.  The story was quickly denied by the White House but Bolden maintains he was not lying. What does this mean?

        

4. The London Times has reported that the Obama administration

endorsed the conditional release of the Lockerbie bomber responsible for the murder of 270 people mostly Americans—on “compassionate grounds.” Meaning that it was adduced by Scottish doctors that the bomber was dying of prostate cancer..  When the bomber was released, the administration complained publicly but the letter the Scots received from the State Department said it was okay so long as he stay in Scotland and not be returned to Libya.   The Scots went the whole way, handed him off to Libya and too late it was discovered he did not have terminal prostate cancer at all—that it was mostly a dodge and that he has many years more to live as a citizen of terrorist-supporting Libya.  But why the ultra-soft attitude toward a terrorist bomber?  

5. Then there’s the Ground Zero Mosque incident where a mosque

has been proclaimed by Muslims to be built two blocks away from the carnage site where 3,000 Americans died as result of Muslim terrorist fury. We all know of that strange rationalization.  The 1^st amendment protects, of course, the “right” to build the mosque: the question is this—isn’t it sacrilegious for that kind of edifice to be built there, to stand as an everlasting rebuke to the memory and relatives of  the innocents who were killed by those regarding them as infidels? A president of the United States should be the last person to disagree.  Yet, improbably, Obama cites “freedom of worship” as an excuse--which sticks an insolent and dirty finger in the eye of America—purposefully seeming inclined to “stick it to” this country. 

                                   His Anti-Colonialist Father. 

       D’Souza does what none of us bothered to do very well, pore over his so-called autobiography Dreams From My Father. I read it cursorily and dropped it after terrorist Billy Ayres told a Chicago Daily Observer columnist, Anne Leary,  that he—Ayres—actually wrote it when Obama got bogged down in writer’s block.  Yes, but the book is still highly revelatory since it was published to reflect Obama’s ideology.   Notice that the title is Dreams FROM My Father—notDreams Of My Father.  

         D’Souza tells us about Barack Obama, Sr.: He was a Luo tribesman who grew up in Kenya, married a white girl from Kansas with the improbable first name of Stanley (because her father had wanted a son; if that isn’t weird enough for you) and won a scholarship to Harvard. Later the wife, the former Stanley Dunham discovered that her husband had been married before; indeed had been married several times and had a flock of children.  This never seemed to diminish her love for him.  He was a revolutionary and romantic character. 

          Obama, Sr. became a senior economist with the government of Kenya but his lifestyle was unsavory: a bigamist (even a polygamist who had four wives and eight children; a frequent drunk driver who, Obama’s brother Mark said, inflicted abuse on his wives and children.  Excessive drinking and driving involved him a many car accidents.  One such accident killed a man; another so seriously injured Barack, Sr. that caused a leg to be amputated.  Finally in 1982, Obama, Sr. got drunk in a bar in Nairobi, drove his car into a tree and was killed.  Obama, Sr. abandoned the Kansan-born wife and son, leaving them when Barack, Jr. was 2 and thereafter only saw his son once, at the age of 10 in Hawaii.  

         Obama, Sr., the revolutionary anti-colonialist, a radical visionary and his anger was romanticized often to young Obama by his white mother.  She remarried to a man who in turn abandoned them both but her first and apparently true love was with Barack Hussein Obama, Sr.     

       And Obama’s own words in his 1995 book clearly tells the fervor he ingested early at her knee about his father: “It was into my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa that I packed all the attributes of Martin [Luther King] and Malcolm [X], DuBois [a co-founder of the NAACP who fled the U.S. to become a Communist revolutionary and died in Ghana at 95] and Mandela [Nelson Mandela]…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!’”

       Whether Obama or his one-time mentor Billy Ayres composed it, the historical facts are undeniable that Barack’s mother inculcated in her son a worshipful attitude toward her ex-husband.   In the book Obama says, “All of my life, I carried a single image of my father, one that I…tried to take as my own.”  D’Souza correctly cites that “anti-colonialism was the rallying cry of 3^rd World politics for much of the second half of the 20^th century…” 

        “It 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.’” 

          Those who follow this dictum believe strongly that U. S. imperialism has been on a rampage.  For years U. S. power was checked by the USSR but with the fall of that country, we became the only superpower.  Moreover, 9/11 gave America the impetus to invade and occupy two countries, Iraq and Afghanistan.  

        Back to his strange support of supporting offshore drilling for Brazil but not for us.  

         “Obama believes the West uses a disproportionate share of the world’s energy resources—so he wants neo-colonial 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 it 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.”  [Italics mine].    

         How did we get a president who seemingly hates our guts?  Because the media—and the Republicans—didn’t do enough to ferret out the real Obama.    The media ached so see the first black president and ran interference for him all the way.  McCain refused to use Jeremiah Wright stuff.  But the anti-Americanism’s all in the book, stupid!…in his (or more likely) Billy Ayres’ words.