Some observers have quit wondering whether President Obama is an inexperienced ideologue intentionally trying to sabotage America so that he can bring on a socialist New World Order.
Instead, several – including liberals – are beginning to ask whether he is mentally unstable.
"Obama in just twenty months has developed a reputation for being petulant and unusually sensitive to the normal run-of-the-mill criticism," notes author Victor Davis Hanson.
Citing a recent Forbes magazine article by college president Dinesh D’Souza, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich told National Review magazine that the problem may be that Obama is operating from a "Kenyan, anti-colonial" worldview that is irrationally and perhaps even unintentionally hostile to the United States.
Others have a different theory
"Does the narcissism of this man know no bounds?" asked psychiatrist and Pulitzer prize-winning columnist Charles Krauthammer. After all, Obama greatly exaggerates his achievements, expects constant praise and admiration, believes he’s special, doesn’t appear to concern himself with other people’s feelings and expresses disdain for those he feels are inferior – all textbook symptoms of Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
"The most dangerous thing about having a narcissist in a position of power is his unwillingness – perhaps his inability – to ever admit error," observes Jack Kelly, a former high-ranking Pentagon official.
Gingrich said that D’Souza made a "stunning insight" into Obama’s behavior – the "most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Barack Obama. What if Obama is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together his actions? That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior." D’Souza is the president of King’s College in New York City and the author of The Roots of Obama’s Rage from Regnery Publishing.
Does Barack Obama suffer from an "empathy deficit?" The question was recently asked in the arch-liberal Internet news site The Daily Beast by journalist Kirsten Powers.
"The president who has talked most about the power of empathy suddenly seems to be lacking in it himself," observes Powers. She served in the Clinton Administration from 1993-1998 and has been published in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the New York Observer, Salon, Elle magazine and American Prospect magazine.
"Ironically, it was Obama who used the phrase ‘empathy deficit’ in a 2008 speech when he diagnosed the United States as suffering from the disorder," writes Powers. "In a plea for unity, candidate Obama said lack of empathy was ‘the essential deficit that exists in this country.’
"He defined it as ‘an inability to recognize ourselves in one another; to understand that we are our brother’s keeper; we are our sister’s keeper; that, in the words of Dr. King, we are all tied together in a single garment of destiny.’
"Yet, as president," says Powers, "Obama has demonstrated an almost pathological incapacity to connect with American’s fear and despair over the future Whether it was the Gulf oil spill or a woman’s heartbreaking pleading at a recent town hall meeting, Obama’s much ballyhooed coolness seems more icy than reassuring.
"He believes empathy is critical to being a good Supreme Court Justice, declaring his opposition to now Chief Justice John Roberts because, he said, Roberts was short on that important quality. In defining what he looks for in a Supreme Court Justice, Obama put empathy at the top of his list: ‘I view that quality of empathy, of understanding and identifying with people’s hopes and struggles, as an essential ingredient for arriving at just decisions and outcomes.’
"Indeed, the Center for Building a Culture of Empathy has chronicled the nearly 60 speeches, debates, interviews and writings where Obama has lectured Americans on the importance of empathy," writes Powers.
In his second autobiography, Audacity of Hope, he wrote that empathy "is at the heart of my moral code, and it is how I understand the Golden Rule – not simply as a call to sympathy or charity, but as something more demanding, a call to stand in somebody else’s shoes and see through their eyes."
"In nearly every commencement speech he delivers, Obama offers students some version of this line and decries the nation’s "empathy deficit."
Does he have an empathy deficit?
At a 2008 rally in Westerville, Ohio, Obama said, "One of the values that I think men in particular have to pass on is the value of empathy. Not sympathy, empathy. And what that means is standing in somebody else’s shoes, being able to look through their eyes. You know, sometimes we get so caught up in ‘us’ that it’s hard to see that there are other people and that your behavior has an impact on them."
"Nothing brought this problem into relief like the two Obama supporters who confronted the president at a recent town hall meeting expressing total despair over their economic situation and hopelessness about the future," writes Powers. "Rather than expressing empathy, Obama seemed annoyed and proceeded with one of his unhelpful lectures.
"No wonder a recent ABC/Washington Post poll found nearly half of all Americans don’t believe he understands people like themselves. A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll found that only 42 percent of Americans approve of how Obama’s is doing his job. A solid majority of all Americans – 56 percent – say that Obama has fallen short of their expectations.
His job is to care
"Some Obama backers will cry that it’s not Obama’s job to be Empathizer-in-Chief. This could not be more misguided," writes Powers. "In fact, one of the most important roles of a president is an ability to lead the electorate through tough times. If he can’t do that, then he will lose power and the ability to enact policies.
"No former president better proves this point than FDR. Jonathan Alter recalled in Newsweek, "In February of 1933, with the banks closed and millions of Americans wiped out, FDR used his ‘first-class temperament’ to treat the mental depression of Americans without curing their economic one.
"In the days following his ‘fear itself’ Inaugural and first ‘Fireside Chat,’ the same citizens who had lined up the month before to withdraw their last savings from the bank (and stuff it under the mattress or tape it to their chests) lined up to redeposit patriotically. This astounding act of ebullient leadership marked the ‘defining moment’ of modern American politics…"
Advice from Bill Clinton
One former President, Bill Clinton, told Politico that Obama is "being criticized for being too disengaged, for not caring. So he needs to turn into it. I may be one of the few people that think it’s not bad that lady said she was getting tired of defending him.
"He needs to hear it. You need to hear. Embrace people’s anger, including their disappointment at you. And just ask them to not let the anger cloud their judgment. Let it concentrate their judgment. And then make your case."
Obama has "got to realize that, in the end, it’s not about him," said Clinton. "It’s about the American people, and they’re hurting."
"Exactly," said Power. "Hopefully Obama is listening."
During a recent public appearance, the President departed from his prepared remarks to accuse critics of "talking about me like a dog."
How dare they!
This protest "was his strangest so far," says Hanson. "The wonder is not that Obama is angry at criticism, but why he is so surprised in a weird ‘how dare they?’ fashion."
The problem is narcissism, says Hanson. Author Jeffrey Kuhner writes that Obama "is a self-absorbed narcissist who portrays himself as a political messiah – the anointed one." Dr. Sam Vaknin, the author of the Malignant Self Love, also believes that "Barack Obama appears to be a narcissist."
Vaknin is a world authority on narcissism. He understands the disorder and describes the inner mind of a narcissist like no other person. When he talks about narcissism everyone listens. Vaknin says that Obama’s language, posture and demeanor, and the testimonies of his closest, dearest and nearest friends suggest that the Senator is either a narcissist or he may have narcissistic personality disorder.
Vaknin explains: "Narcissistic leaders are nefarious and their effects pernicious. They are subtle, refined, socially-adept, manipulative, possessed of thespian skills, and convincing. Both types, cerebral and somatic, equally lack empathy and are ruthless and relentless or driven."
These were the very traits that distinguished Hitler and Khomeini.
"Many of these traits can be seen in Obama," notes Vaknin. "As for his ruthlessness, perhaps his support of legislation to let babies die if they survive abortion, gives a glimpse into his soul, that he may lacks empathy, does not value life, and if in the position of power can be ruthless."
They are self-worshipers
"Narcissists need power to show their ruthlessness. Considering the fact that Obama neglected his own half brother, George Hussein Obama, who lives on one dollar per month in Kenya, we can’t vouch for Obama’s empathy or say he is a caring person.
"This is a person," notes Gingrich, "who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president.
"I think he worked very hard at being a person who is normal, reasonable, moderate, bipartisan, transparent, accommodating – none of which was true," said Gingrich.
"Narcissists have only one issue," says Vaknin. "They want power and will do and say anything to get it. Their words mean nothing to them. They do not intend to keep them.
"They look into your eyes and swear on a stack of Bibles that they are not going to do something when that is exactly what they intend to do. They break their promises when it suits them and annul their treaties when they can get away with it.
Narcissists are pathological liars
They lie even to themselves. Ironically, they are the first to believe their own lies. When normal people lie, they show signs of distress. Narcissists don’t. They can pass any polygraph test with flying colors. It is this conviction that fools people around them making them believe in their truthfulness and sincerity. In a twisted way they are sincere because, although they are conscience that they are not truthful, they believe in their own lies. This is difficult to understand and even more difficult to explain, but for a narcissist fantasy and reality are intertwined. The narcissist’s delusional thoughts of grandiosity are real to him.
"Obama is in the great tradition of Edison, Ford, the Wright Brothers, Bill Gates – he saw his opportunity and he took it," Gingrich says. "The American people may take it back, in which case I may or may not be the recipient of that, but I have zero doubt that the American people will take it back. Unlike Ford, the Wright Brothers, et cetera, this guy’s invention did not work."
Vaknin writes: "Narcissists use anything they can lay their hands on in the pursuit of narcissistic supply. If God, creed, church, faith, and institutionalized religion can provide them with narcissistic supply, they will become devout. They will abandon religion if it can’t."
Narcissists are often callous and even ruthless. As the norm, they lack conscience. A man who lives in luxury, who raised nearly half a billion dollars for his campaign (something unprecedented in history) has no interest in the plight of his own brother. Why? Because, his brother cannot be used for his ascent to power. A narcissist cares for no one but himself.
Narcissism is all about image. Vaknin says, "The narcissist is shallow, a pond pretending to be an ocean. He likes to think of himself as a Renaissance man, a Jack of all trades. The narcissist never admits to ignorance in any field – yet, typically, he is ignorant of them all. It is surprisingly easy to penetrate the gloss and the veneer of the narcissist’s self-proclaimed omniscience."
Narcissists are empty in substance but full on promises. Obama has not proposed a single concrete workable plan, but he has raised the hopes and expectations of millions of people with his promises. The glorious tomorrow that he offers is no more real than the Styrofoam Greek columns that adorned his image during his acceptance speech.
Narcissists hide their illness well
Vaknin says, "When the narcissist reveals his true colors, it is usually far too late. His victims are unable to separate from him. They are frustrated by this acquired helplessness and angry at themselves for having failed to see through the narcissist earlier on."
"He was being the person he needed to be in order to achieve the position he needed to achieve," says Gingrich. "He was authentically dishonest.
"I think Obama gets up every morning with a worldview that is fundamentally wrong about reality. If you look at the continuous denial of reality, there has got to be a point where someone stands up and says that this is just factually insane."
"Obama’s petulance, I think, more likely derives from a certain surprise," writes Davis, "leading to anger that originates from novel and sudden demands for accountability. Quite simply, no one has dared question Obama before – much less press him for deeds to match his mellifluous words.
"Did he really think he could talk his way through four years of the American presidency? Apparently, he did, and apparently he was almost right – given that rhetoric and sophistry earned him the presidency in the first place. In what follows, I hold some empathy for Obama’s pique; you see in some sense those around him suddenly changed the rules, and what in the past had been habit and custom no longer quite applied.
"We know Obama got into Columbia University," writes Hanson. "We have no idea what he accomplished there – or whether his undergraduate transcript merited admission to Harvard Law School. Obama may have charmed his way into the Harvard Law Review, but in brilliant fashion he seems to have guessed rightly that once there he would be singularly exempt from the usual requirements of quantifiable achievement."
Cut-throat tactics; anything to win
"Most candidates for state office do not sue to remove their opponents from the ballot," writes Hanson. "Obama petitioned (successfully) that most of them be disqualified in 1995. It is likewise rare for the sealed divorce records of a front-running primary rival to be mysteriously leaked, prompting a veritable uncontested nomination. But after Democratic rival Blair Hull imploded from such revelations, so did Obama’s general election Republican opponent Jack Ryan, who dropped out of the race after his divorce proceedings were eerily likewise exposed. Lightning does strike twice in the same place for the blessed Obama.
"Throughout the Obama presidential odyssey, an enthralled media variously dubbed him a ‘god,’ confessed to tingling sensations when he spoke, and in vicious fashion turned on any politician who tried to question Obama’s actual record of achievement – whether Hillary Clinton or Sarah Palin.
"There is no need to pursue the journalistic malfeasance that allowed the president of the United States to be inaugurated without any real past scrutiny. Suffice to say that any future presidential candidate who promises to cool the planet and lower the rising seas will be laughed out of contention – even if he puts ‘yes, we can’ into Latin on his pre-presidential seal.
"For some reason," writes Hanson, "Obama believed that those who expected after his campaign promises a real upturn in the economy, or fiscal responsibility, or inspired foreign policy would be satisfied, as they had in the past, merely with soaring rhetoric and superficial reassurance.
"Given all that, it is understandable both why America is very worried about what it has wrought – and why Barack Obama is miffed and lashes out.
"You would, too, if both accountability and criticism were novel experiences at 49."
"Barack Obama," writes D’Souza, "is the most anti-business 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 August 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 percent of the world’s oil but have less than 2 percent of the world’s resources.’
"Obama," continues D’Souza, "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 percent 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."
Repeating past mistakes
"The President continues to push for stimulus even though hundreds of billions of dollars in such funds seem to have done little," writes D’Souza. "The unemployment rate when Obama took office in January 2009 was 7.7 percent; now it is 9.5 percent. 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 percent of Americans pay 40 percent of all federal income taxes. The next 9 percent of income earners pay another 30 percent.
"So the top 10 percent pays 70 percent of the taxes. The bottom 40 percent 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 ‘halfhearted.’ They released him to his home country, where he lives today as a free man.
"One more anomaly," writes D’Souza. "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?"
Very strange behavior
"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," writes D’Souza. "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," writes D’Souza. "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," writes D’Souza. "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.
"To his son, the elder Obama represented a great and noble cause, the cause of anti-colonialism," writes D’Souza. "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 anti-colonialism, because I am a native of Mumbai, India," writes D’Souza. "I am part of the first Indian generation to be born after my country’s independence from the British. Anti-colonialism was the rallying cry of Third World politics for much of the second half of the 20th century. To most Americans, however, anti-colonialism is an unfamiliar idea, so let me explain it.
"Anti-colonialism 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.’
"Anti-colonialists 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 anti-colonial 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 anti-colonial 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?’
Bringing down power structures
"As he put it," writes D’Souza, "‘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 percent 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 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," writes D’Souza. "Even then, he recognized what has become a new tenet of anti-colonialist 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.’"
They believe the U.S. must be stopped
"From the anti-colonial 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," writes D’Souza. "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 anti-colonial view, America is now the rogue elephant that subjugates and tramples the people of the world.
"It may seem incredible to suggest that the anti-colonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son. 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."
Brazil can drill offshore, but not America
"For Obama, the solutions are simple," writes D’Souza. "He must work to wring the neocolonialism out of America and the West. And here is where our anti-colonial 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," writes D’Souza. "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.
No tax rate is too high
"If Obama shares his father’s anti-colonial crusade, that would explain why he wants people who are already paying close to 50 percent of their income in overall taxes to pay even more. The anti-colonialist 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 just. Recall what Obama Sr. said in his 1965 paper: There is no tax rate too high, and even a 100 percent 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 anti-colonial 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 anti-colonialism makes sense of Obama’s curious mandate to convert a space agency into a Muslim and international outreach," writes D’Souza. "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 anti-colonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. goes a long way to explain the actions and policies of his son in the Oval Office," writes D’Souza.
"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!’
He has continued his father’s struggle
"The climax of Obama’s narrative is when he goes to Kenya and weeps at his father’s grave," writes D’Souza.
"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," writes D’Souza. "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 anti-colonial.
"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," writes D’Souza. "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 anti-colonial ambitions, is now setting the nation’s agenda through 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."
