And the Worshippers Object!

Sep. 16 2010 - 11:16 am | 2,064 views | 0 recommendations | 1 comment
The Obamorons Strike Back
By DINESH D'SOUZA

During the 2008 election campaign I coined the phrase “Obamorons” to describe the uncritical cheerleaders of Obama–the people who would leap to his defense even if he drove a truck over his aged grandmother. Love-stricken TV host Chris Matthews comes to mind, complete with thrills running up his leg, as does English major Maureen Dowd, lifestyle columnist for the New York Times. The Times itself is a leading Obamoron outlet.

Well, the Obamorons are now in a mad fury, and this time the culprit is my cover story in the September 27 issue of Forbes. The story is adapted from my new book The Roots of Obama’s Rage. Let me just say that if the Forbes article so upset these guys, wait until the book comes out. It may prove extremely difficult for the Obamorons to digest; perhaps it will have to be administered as a suppository.

Leading the Obamoron charge this time was White House press secretary Robert Gibbs. Gibbs was reacting to Newt Gingrich’s comment that my article offered the most “stunningly insightful” analysis of Obama that he had read in six years. Gingrich’s reference to “Kenyan anti-colonialism” raised Gibbs’ ire. Gibbs said he had “no idea” what Gingrich was talking about. He should have stopped there: if you have no idea what someone is talking about, it’s a good idea to shut up. But Gibbs went on to link Gingrich and me with the birther thesis: the charge that Obama was not born in the United States.

This is a complete distortion of my argument. Anyone who read the Forbes article could see that it had nothing to do with the birther allegation. In The Roots of Obama’s Rage I explicitly say that Obama was born in Hawaii, as evidenced by the fact that two local newspapers noted his birth in August 1961. Clearly Gibbs had not read the article he was commenting on. Again, the man should have stayed quiet–unless, of course, he was told to strike back by the subject of the article.

Gibbs fired a second salvo a few days later, asking, “Why didn’t Forbes hire a fact checker…did they simply not care about the facts?” Gibbs offered no facts of his own, however. He merely linked to two web posts–one in the Columbia Journalism Review, one on “The Fourth Branch”–that disputed the article. The Columbia Journalism Review piece was high on invective (“the worst kind of smear journalism–a singularly disgusting work,” blah blah blah) but simply quoted large segments of the article as if they were self-evidently appalling–which of course they are to all confirmed Obamorons, who are only satisfied with hosannas and genuflections before the Anoined One.

“The Fourth Branch” accused me of raising the “prism of race,” in short, of playing the race card. Again, this is totally bogus. I explicitly say in my article that Obama is not motivated by race–that race has nothing to do with this. In the book I develop this much further, showing that a big reason for our confusion about Obama is that we are always trying to to fit him into American history. In the process we ignore Obama’s own history. I realize that anti-colonialism is an unfamiliar notion to many Americans, but it is a very familiar concept in Kenya, where Obama’s father was born, and also in India, where I was born. This is about Third World anti-colonialism; it is not about race.

For me the most unkindest cut of all was when Maureen Dowd in yesterday’s New York Times accused Gingrich and me of low intellectual standards. “This is what passes for intellectualism on the right?” Here is Maureen Dowd’s idea of intellectualism: to dub me “Ann Coulter in pants.” But what do you expect from a Catholic University English major who specializes in little sarcasms devoid of mental content? I feel silly spelling out my credentials, but I did graduate Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth, I did serve as senior domestic policy analyst in the White House, I was the Olin Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, I also was the Rishwain Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and I am currently the president of the King’s College in New York City. (Check it out: www.tkc.edu) So compared to Dowd, I am a veritable Einstein!

My article did contain one minor, inconsequential error: I noted that Obama spent the first 17 years of his life off the American mainland, and that’s true: Obama spent those years in Hawaii and Indonesia. But I said he visited Pakistan during this time, while in fact his Pakistan trip was a couple of years later, when he was a student at Occidental College.

Some critics have noted that my reference to the Obama administration’s subsidy for the Brazilian drilling company Petrobras was unfair, given that the decision to provide loan guarantees was made in part by Bush appointees to the Export-Import Bank. This is an argumentum ad ignorantium–an argument that relies on the ignorance of the audience. If you don’t know how the government works, you are likely to be taken in by it. But those of us who have worked in the federal government know that many agencies have left-over appointees from previous administrations. Still, when a new administration takes over, it is the new administration that is responsible and has the final say over what these agencies do. The Obama administration signed off on the loans to Petrobras, and obviously it bears final responsibility for those loans. This was precisely the point of the Wall Street Journal article I cited: to ask why the Obama administration wants more oil drilling in Brazil but less in the United States. “Environmentalism” doesn’t explain this double-standard, but anti-colonialism does.

Yesterday I did Glenn Beck’s radio show for an hour, and the book–which will be out in a couple of weeks–rocketed to the top 5 on the amazon bestseller list. There is a lot more to come. So why did the article previewing the book so enrage the White House and the Obamorons? Because it provides a belated but desperately-needed explanatory framework for Obama. Finally we have a key that actually opens the lock. No, Obama is not a Muslim. No, Obama is not a socialist. The truth is far worse.