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"Dinesh D'Souza"
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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.