"This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anti-colonial ambitions, is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son.”
- Dinesh D’Souza, "The Roots of Obama’s Rage”
By: Linda Case Gibbons
Nature, nurture? It is one of the oldest issues in psychology.
Who knows what goes into the making of a man. But it is a question that writer and film director Dinesh D’Souza tackles in his film "2016: Obama’s America.” Based on D’Souza’s New York Times bestselling book "The Roots of Obama’s Rage,” the film is fair and balanced while searching for the real Obama.
As D’Souza says, Obama "Love him, hate him, you don’t know him.”
D’Souza admits several false starts trying to pin down what the premise of his book would be.
He first thought Obama was promulgating a variation of liberalism, different from our founding fathers, wherein rights are conceded to the state. But it wasn’t a good fit.
D’Souza then ran with the premise that Obama was a product of the Civil Rights movement, but soon realized Obama’s world "was not the world of segregated lunch counters or separate water fountains, but rather a world much like the one that I grew up in: the Third World.”
And that was the key, confirmed by Obama himself in his book, "Dreams From My Father.”
Growing up in Hawaii and Indonesia, Obama experienced Third World conditions and was exposed to radical rhetoric through his mother, Ann Dunham, herself a radical. That was his world. It included Frank Marshall Davis, a card carrying Communist and mentor.
These associations were ones he himself sought out consistently in later years, with radical friends, professors and associates, including the people surrounding him in the White House and his pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
As part of his home environment, he heard nothing but accolades from his mother about his father, despite the fact that the elder Obama had abandoned his wife and child and was not divorced from his first wife back in Kenya.
Using Obama's book as a touchstone, D’Souza realized that Obama could be explained by looking to the father and the son, their lives and writings, which showed that the son had adopted the father’s world view – anti-colonialism.
Barack Obama, Sr., for some unknown reason, was chosen, as was his son, to travel a privileged road. He studied economics and was educated at the University of Hawaii and Harvard and was blessed, as was his son, with assistance in gaining access to an America from which most Americans are foreclosed.
Born in Kenya during the British rule, he harbored a life-long hatred for colonialism, a belief which places blame on Western colonial exploitation for the poverty and suffering of the Third World.
It is the doctrine, D’Souza explains, that colonial "empires are produced by murderous conquest and sustained by unceasing terror and violence; that colonial regimes are racist; that it is a system of piracy in which the wealth of the colonized countries is systematically stolen by the colonizers.”
"The fourth tenet of anti-colonialism is that the colonial powers have a new leader: the United States.”
It is a world view that, as president, Obama would do his best to effectuate. And he has.
All of a sudden it all makes sense.
It explains all the puzzling actions we have witnessed from this president: his lack of interest in black Americans except to incite division, disinterest in fostering self-sustaining means of energy for the betterment of the country.
His ardent protective attitude for Muslims, the return of the bust of Churchill to the Brits, his disinterest in the BP spill in the Gulf, his veto of the Keystone XL Pipeline, his rudeness to America’s allies, his enabling Brazil and Mexico to drill in the Gulf while denying access to U.S. companies.
And all the little things, no flag in the lapel, not saluting the flag with hand over heart, and a non-stop deprecation of America to the rest of the world, describing the United States as a nation that is not exceptional, whose people did not build the businesses they have.
It explains why when citizens are shocked at his flagrant spending of taxpayer dollars he continues to spend. It is because he doesn’t care.
It explains why he cavalierly thumbs his nose at this country’s laws. He doesn’t care.
He wants to open our borders and help the downtrodden at the cost of America. He wants to cut military funding and nuclear readiness at the cost of America.
It explains why our president is nonplussed when the United States credit rating was downgraded for the first time in its history.
He doesn’t care because taking America down is his goal. There’s a fox in the hen house.
We see that despite the similarity of D’Souza’s and Obama’s backgrounds, -- age, Ivy League educations, high professional success, parents who were wary of white people -- when Dinesh D’Souza and Barack Obama look at this country, the United States of America, they see two entirely different things.
D’Souza a native of India and now a U.S. citizen sees a country he loves; Obama a country for which he has nothing but disdain.
By his own admission in his book, Obama said he learned early the technique of smiling and saying little so as to win the approval of white people, a method that has served him so well that now as president he has been able to enact changes that are alarming.
So sometimes I dream. What would I do if a magic fish – or a genie – appeared and offered to grant me three wishes about my country. I would be hard pressed to come up with only three. How could I choose?
Well, I guess I could wish for a president who actually liked this country.
A secretary of Homeland Security who cares about HOMELAND SECURITY.
Actually I’d wish for a new secretary of Homeland Security who isn’t up on federal discrimination charges filed by her male colleague shortly after she held a June Gay Pride event at the DHS celebrating Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender employees.
An attorney general who sues people like the New Black Panthers instead of American states and doesn’t stump for "his people.”
A president I don’t have to psychoanalyze to figure out what the heck he is doing, while he cheerfully runs rough shod over the U.S. Constitution, laws passed by Congress, and rules of fair play.
An administration that knows the meaning of the word "illegal.”
A First Lady who doesn’t skip rope or do push-ups on tv.
A country where journalists like Neil Munro can ask the tough questions again.
A country where whatever your party affiliation, you would be able to speak out on behalf of what’s true for your country and not be "Cory-Bookered.”
And never, ever again to have to see Robin Roberts or Nancy O’Dell or Brian Williams cozying up to Michelle and Barack, while the president delightedly shows his "fun” side. We’ve all seen his other side, even though the mainstream press denies there is one.
But if I have to choose, I would wish that Barack Obama was more like his brother, George.
Believe it or not, George, who was six months old when his father died, turns out to be a conservative and makes it clear he does not agree with his father’s anti-colonial views.
In the film George says, "at the time of its independence in the early 1960’s Kenya was on an economic par with Malaysia or Singapore. Look where we are now and where they are. They’re practically developed and industrialized, while Kenya is still a basket case.”
"George Obama believes that poor countries should take responsibility for their own situation,” says DeSouza.
"What’s our excuse for failure?” George Obama asks. "We don’t have one. We’ve only got ourselves to blame.’”
D’Souza sums up this man, living in a hut in Nairobi, brother to the most powerful man in the world.
"He doesn’t worship at the shrine of Barack Obama Sr. and he espouses an ideology diametrically opposed to that of his father and his famous brother. George has experienced first-hand the empty rhetoric of the two Baracks and he rejects it based on his actual experience of Third World poverty.”
Maybe, as D’Souza says in his film, we elected the wrong Obama.
Hold the line, America.